[{"id":277151,"date":"2026-09-24T04:12:29","date_gmt":"2026-09-24T08:12:29","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/?p=277151"},"modified":"2026-09-23T11:23:31","modified_gmt":"2026-09-23T15:23:31","slug":"sam-a-miller-on-youtube-storytelling-and-choosing-science-fiction","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/sam-a-miller-on-youtube-storytelling-and-choosing-science-fiction\/","title":{"rendered":"Sam A. Miller on YouTube Storytelling and Choosing Science Fiction"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Fiction writer and popular YouTuber Sam A. Miller joins co-hosts Christian Barter and V.V. Ganeshananthan to talk about his debut story collection, <i>Still Lost: Tales from the Year 2080, <\/i>as well as his educational and comedic videos<i>. <\/i>Miller reflects on how he got started on YouTube a decade ago, when he was an adolescent, and amassed 4.8 million followers by developing Sam O\u2019Nella Academy, a channel with a scrappy, homemade feel and distinct illustrations. Miller discusses the genesis of the unusual aliens who set the stage for most of <i>Still Lost\u2019s <\/i>human-centered stories by solving potentially world-ending problems like climate change right off the bat. He explains why he decided to self-publish the science fiction collection and how it found its way to a traditional publisher. He also shares his science fiction influences and talks about how his personal history with addiction shapes the book\u2019s final story. He reads from <i>Still Lost.\u00a0<\/i><\/p>\n<p><iframe style=\"width: 100%; height: 200px; border: 0 none;\" src=\"https:\/\/art19.com\/shows\/9de36b8c-32a9-49c0-9b19-8d98127e539f\/episodes\/5081dbc5-d387-41bb-923a-43398d5a5a1f\/embed\" scrolling=\"no\" sandbox=\"allow-scripts allow-popups allow-popups-to-escape-sandbox\"><\/iframe><\/p>\n<p><em>To hear the full episode, subscribe through iTunes, Google Play, Stitcher, Spotify, or your favorite podcast app (include the forward slashes when searching). You can also listen by streaming from the player below. Check out video versions of our interviews on the <a href=\"https:\/\/www.instagram.com\/fiction.non.fiction.podcast\/\">Fiction\/Non\/Fiction Instagram account<\/a>, the <a href=\"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/channel\/UC07g9fxim0XbDM_LhlnCL0w\/featured?disable_polymer=1\">Fiction\/Non\/Fiction YouTube Channel<\/a>, and our show website: <a href=\"https:\/\/www.fnfpodcast.net\/\">https:\/\/www.fnfpodcast.net\/<\/a> This podcast is produced by Christian Barter, V.V. Ganeshananthan, AJ Abernathy, Grace Workman, and Sienna Hoopingarner.\u00a0<\/em><\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: center;\"><a href=\"https:\/\/www.penguinrandomhouse.com\/authors\/2364133\/sam-a-miller\/\"><b>Sam Miller<\/b><\/a><\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: center;\"><a href=\"https:\/\/moonpalacebooks.com\/item\/rBSsMLeAZlZenn_r-JgqYw\"><i>Still Lost: Tales from the Year 2080<\/i><\/a> by Sam A. Miller \u2022\u00a0<a href=\"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/@SamONellaAcademy\">Sam O&#8217;Nella Academy &#8211; YouTube<\/a><\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: center;\"><b>Others<\/b><\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: center;\"><a href=\"https:\/\/moonpalacebooks.com\/item\/WLhu9GQ-hlPuBL2cz4MCwA\"><i>Stories of Your Life and Others<\/i><\/a> by Ted Chiang\u00a0\u00a0\u2022 <a href=\"https:\/\/moonpalacebooks.com\/item\/UPeceejxZgdfdBMa_7_HWA\/lists\/LTBIx81K29o0\/\"><i>Project Hail Mary<\/i><\/a> by Andy Weir \u2022\u00a0<a href=\"https:\/\/moonpalacebooks.com\/item\/pAG4rDFNcoy-zO89jzcMUg\"><i>Blindsight<\/i><\/a> by Peter Watts \u2022\u00a0<a href=\"https:\/\/moonpalacebooks.com\/item\/o_Otu4jkoOLonAcSqK9p5g\"><i>Wheelers<\/i><\/a> by Ian Stewart &amp; Jack Cohen<\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: center;\"><b>EXCERPT FROM A CONVERSATION<\/b><b>\u00a0 WITH SAM A. MILLER\u00a0<\/b><\/p>\n<p><b>Christian Barter:<\/b> Your YouTube channel also covers a wide range of topics. So, why did you choose to write science fiction? You seem like a writer who could have written in any genre.<\/p>\n<p><b>Sam A. Miller: <\/b>I appreciate that. I&#8217;m not sure I&#8217;d be immensely qualified for historical fiction, if I&#8217;m being honest. I consider myself kind of a generalist, which is a nicer way of saying I don&#8217;t know shit. A broad base, but no expertise in anything, you know. And so, I think science fiction is best suited for that because I think a lot of the appeal of the genre is taking these disparate things like technology, philosophy, and merging them together, and creating something better than the sum of its parts.<\/p>\n<p><b>V.V. Ganeshananthan:<\/b> Absolutely. I just want to point our listeners also at the back of the book. You did this really cool thing where you have story notes, which is different than, I don&#8217;t know, citations. It&#8217;s a little bit more like in Best American Short Stories, they have these little squibs at the back where the writer talks about how the story came to be, and I really liked having these windows into things like \u201cBeing A Nothingness\u201d or into the [alien] Xenos, and so these are like cool little liner notes.\u00a0 How did you decide to do that? It&#8217;s not the norm.<\/p>\n<p><b>SAM:<\/b> In <i>Stories of Your Life and Others<\/i> by Ted Chiang, he did that, and I thought it was just fascinating to see what was going on in his head. I think also when it comes to certain kinds of more human experiences, I wanted to make it clear that they come from a place of authenticity, particularly with the last story. I speak a bit on addiction, and so I wanted to go a bit into my history on that, just to make it abundantly clear that I am coming from this place. I&#8217;m not attempting to portray someone else&#8217;s experiences inauthentically. I&#8217;d also like to make it clear through these story notes that\u2014I use these characters as punching bags occasionally, and I wanted it to be clear in case somebody saw themselves in these characters, I am not punching at you. I am punching at myself. All of these characters that go through this growth are in some way something I have experienced\u2026 a lot of it is me talking to my past self.<\/p>\n<p><b>VVG:<\/b> Sure, and that self-deprecation is also a fundamental principle of comedy and humor, which is a lot of what your stories are doing too. I really liked the little windows into things like what the first draft of the story \u201cAgency\u201d was like, which is about a version of football players who are monstrous, and sometimes if you were referencing a text, and I didn&#8217;t know the text, sometimes I was helped into understanding all of the layers of the story.<\/p>\n<p>I also know that the book in this form is not the way that it was originally published, because you were self-published first, which is fascinating to me. You and I now share a publisher. I&#8217;m also published by Penguin Random House. So, how did you decide to self-publish and promote <i>Still Lost<\/i>? And then, how did the book find its way to Penguin Random House?<\/p>\n<p><b>SAM:<\/b> Self-publishing was kind of a no-brainer for me. I have a very DIY ethos, as evidenced by the entire nature of my channel. I am independent to a fault in that way, but at the same time, my ability to get my own voice out is limited. Also, by the way, thank you for inviting me again. But just to see what would happen, I basically had a fake copyright page in the self-published version of that book. I didn&#8217;t have any actual copyright things to put, so it was just a bunch of goofy stuff. But among that was a thing saying, &#8220;Hey, if you are a literary agent, email me here,\u201d and then a literary agent emailed me and introduced me to Penguin and I realized there are a lot of opportunities to be had here to see this thing succeed and I couldn&#8217;t say no.<\/p>\n<p><b>VVG:<\/b> So the version of the book that you self-published, I was looking at\u2014maybe it was your Amazon page, and someone had gotten a shipment of the old book, and they were like, &#8220;What is this? This is different than what I was expecting. And I thought, &#8220;This person kind of has the collector&#8217;s edition now, and they don&#8217;t know.\u201d Maybe it was Reddit. Anyway, they are different! They have different covers, and then they have some things in common. You added some stories. Can you talk about the changes between the versions?<\/p>\n<p><b>SAM:<\/b> That\u2019s true, yeah. So the new one has two new stories. One of which was \u201cAgency.\u201d The premise, as you said, is these enhanced athletes in what is called the UNFL, Unrestricted National Football League. They&#8217;re essentially allowed to do whatever drugs or hormones or surgeries or gene therapies they possibly can, simply to make them better at the game of football. And that is a very funny, exploitable premise on its surface.<\/p>\n<p>And then I started writing it, and it was just very predictably grim and dark. Just this man, essentially destroying himself while his friend watched. It was very similar in arc to the last story, \u201cBeat,\u201d but again without the personal authenticity required to justify that kind of darkness. And on top of it, it just wasn&#8217;t very funny. So, what I did to make it work this second time around is I said, Hey, this is the future, right? So, what if you know the CTE or the in-universe equivalent to CTE? What if that was reversible? You know, the stakes are for sure lower and it\u2019s a bit less serious, but also it makes this work. I think it makes it so you can laugh a bit about this guy being completely addled because you know he can be saved from that condition. In the same way, you can laugh at a drunk person because you know they will be sober sometime in the near future.<\/p>\n<p><b><i>Transcribed by Otter.ai. Condensed and edited by AJ Abernathy, Grace Workman, and Sienna Hoopingarner.<\/i><\/b><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Fiction writer and popular YouTuber Sam A. Miller joins co-hosts Christian Barter and V.V. Ganeshananthan to talk about his debut story collection, Still Lost: Tales from the Year 2080, as well as his educational and comedic videos. Miller reflects on<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3671,"featured_media":277455,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"om_disable_all_campaigns":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[43069,6,43112,43072,43110,43070],"tags":[110498,32311,41410,5089,112456,112458,112457,8302,32310,1683],"class_list":["post-277151","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-craftandcriticism","category-features","category-fiction-non-fiction-lithubradio","category-in-conversation","category-lithubradio","category-literary-criticism","tag-christian-barter","tag-fictionnonfiction","tag-lit-hub-radio","tag-podcasts","tag-sam-a-miller","tag-samonellaacademy","tag-stil-lost-tales-from-the-year-2080","tag-tech","tag-v-v-ganeshananthan","tag-youtube","story-type-fiction-non-fiction"],"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p5rKFr-1a6b","jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/09\/banner-FNF26.png","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/277151","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3671"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=277151"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/277151\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/277455"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=277151"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=277151"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=277151"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}},{"id":277063,"date":"2026-09-24T04:08:57","date_gmt":"2026-09-24T08:08:57","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/?p=277063"},"modified":"2026-09-23T14:18:25","modified_gmt":"2026-09-23T18:18:25","slug":"sanna-wani-on-crafting-a-poetics-of-daughterhood","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/sanna-wani-on-crafting-a-poetics-of-daughterhood\/","title":{"rendered":"Sanna Wani on Crafting a Poetics of Daughterhood"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>I have always been a writer that draws on my personal life in my writing. The two\u2014my creative practice and my life\u2014often travel often side by side, one after the other, each taking turns leading. So when I am <a href=\"https:\/\/liminaltransitreview.com\/to-be-on-the-periphery-an-interview-with-sanna-wani\/\">asked a question during an interview<\/a> about how daughterhood fits into my understanding of myself as a poet, I don\u2019t know how to answer. Is it because daughterhood is too deeply entwined with my sense of self? Or because it is so disparate, so singular?<\/p>\n<p>I am writing a story that revolves around a daughter coming to terms with a fraught, fragile relationship with her family. An absent father\u2014mourning a mother\u2014a startling lack of siblings but a plethora of cousins\u2014exile from her community.<\/p>\n<p>This is barely a description of what actually happens, but more of an understanding of what lies beneath the surface of the plot, the emotional core of the adventure at hand, maybe even what critics sometimes call the driving force of a novel.<\/p>\n<p>While a label like \u2018woman\u2019 has always felt stifling and strange, \u2018daughter\u2019 doesn\u2019t carry that heaviness. To be a daughter is to know a particular kind of duty. It is a labor of love, a practice of attention, a relation of care. A vocation, even.<\/p>\n<p>What I say to the interviewer, eventually, is that maybe what happened with the book we\u2019re discussing\u2014<a href=\"https:\/\/bookshop.org\/a\/132\/9781487013714\"><i>Lantern<\/i><\/a><i>\u2014<\/i>is that I was spending a lot of time as I wrote untangling what it means to be a daughter. There was the daughter I had been and the daughter that I was becoming. Both went hand in hand with poetry I was writing and the life I was building: the schism between them, the echo.<\/p>\n<p class=\"pullquote\">To be a daughter is to know a particular kind of duty. It is a labor of love, a practice of attention, a relation of care. A vocation, even.<\/p>\n<p>My dad always says, <i>Betiyaan wafadar hoti haan.<\/i> Meaning: <i>Daughters are loyal<\/i>. Or maybe \u201ctend to be\u201d or \u201coften are\u201d\u2014I\u2019m not sure how to capture the tone in which he says it: slightly wistful, sure, tender. Translation\u2019s fallacy, I guess. He\u2019s usually thinking about sons too\u2014or his son\u2014but that\u2019s another story. This wafadari was part of what I was contesting. Where <i>loyalty<\/i>\u2019s root lies in law, <i>wafadari<\/i>\u2019s lies in promise. What had I been promising? To whom and by which laws? What were the bounds, how was I breaking them? What were my expectations or my parents\u2019 of what a good life should look like?<\/p>\n<p>This is an old story. This is a story that has already been told too\u2014loving and complicated families, prodigal daughters, contact, and closure. \u201cThere is a cost to closure,\u201d I write in a poem about my family in the collection. There is friction, most times for most people, between who you are and where you come from. In my own version of this story, I must come to terms with my telling\u2019s failure as a much as its success in every attempt. I am comforted by the fact that those who will understand will understand, and those who won\u2019t, won\u2019t. I return often to Edouard Glissant\u2019s injunction on the right to opacity in <a href=\"https:\/\/press.umich.edu\/Books\/P\/Poetics-of-Relation\"><i>Poetics of Relation<\/i><\/a>: the right for individuals and cultures to withhold, to not be fully understood, or made transparent by dominant (usually Western) frameworks or systems of thought.<\/p>\n<p>So even as I write to you about daughterhood, there are limits to my explanation. I will not make transparent, the conflict between my family and me. I will not make transparent what I did wrong or what they did. I refuse to become a vessel of morality, a lesson in honor or lack thereof, and most of all, I refuse to conflate myself with Western narratives about love, freedom, duty or shame.<\/p>\n<p>But I wrote about it, in my way. I had to. When I was in high school, I started writing poetry partially because I found out that my mother was reading my journal. I was horrified, of course, and she regrets it now, but it created for me a language that was solely my own. That, even if someone else read the words, perhaps some part of it could be withheld, could be sheltered. It could only to be shared if the experience was\u2014if the feeling was.<\/p>\n<p>In Audre Lorde\u2019s seminal essay, <a href=\"https:\/\/makinglearning.wordpress.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2014\/01\/poetry-is-not-a-luxury-audre-lorde.pdf\">\u201cPoetry is Not a Luxury,\u201d<\/a> Lorde writes that freedom is rooted in feeling: that \u201cpoetry coins the language to express and charter revolutionary awareness and demand, and actions are the implementation of that freedom.\u201d Poetry creates the \u201cquality of light by which we scrutinize our lives.\u201d This light and its scrutiny form the foundation for a poetics of daughterhood I was practicing; for the kind of daughter I still am.<\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: center;\">____________________________<\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: center;\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" data-attachment-id=\"277064\" data-permalink=\"https:\/\/lithub.com\/sanna-wani-on-crafting-a-poetics-of-daughterhood\/lantern\/\" data-orig-file=\"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/09\/lantern.jpg\" data-orig-size=\"1800,2400\" data-comments-opened=\"1\" data-image-meta=\"{&quot;aperture&quot;:&quot;0&quot;,&quot;credit&quot;:&quot;&quot;,&quot;camera&quot;:&quot;&quot;,&quot;caption&quot;:&quot;&quot;,&quot;created_timestamp&quot;:&quot;0&quot;,&quot;copyright&quot;:&quot;&quot;,&quot;focal_length&quot;:&quot;0&quot;,&quot;iso&quot;:&quot;0&quot;,&quot;shutter_speed&quot;:&quot;0&quot;,&quot;title&quot;:&quot;&quot;,&quot;orientation&quot;:&quot;0&quot;,&quot;alt&quot;:&quot;&quot;}\" data-image-title=\"lantern\" data-image-description=\"\" data-image-caption=\"\" data-large-file=\"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/09\/lantern-768x1024.jpg\" class=\"alignnone size-medium wp-image-277064\" src=\"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/09\/lantern-225x300.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"225\" height=\"300\" srcset=\"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/09\/lantern-225x300.jpg 225w, https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/09\/lantern-768x1024.jpg 768w, https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/09\/lantern-45x60.jpg 45w, https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/09\/lantern-1152x1536.jpg 1152w, https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/09\/lantern-1536x2048.jpg 1536w, https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/09\/lantern-38x50.jpg 38w, https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/09\/lantern.jpg 1800w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 225px) 100vw, 225px\" \/><\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: center;\"><a href=\"https:\/\/bookshop.org\/a\/132\/9781487013714\">Lantern<\/a> <em>by Sanna Wani is available from House of Anansi.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>I have always been a writer that draws on my personal life in my writing. The two\u2014my creative practice and my life\u2014often travel often side by side, one after the other, each taking turns leading. So when I am asked<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":32224,"featured_media":277117,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"om_disable_all_campaigns":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[43071,43069,6],"tags":[112288,7818,517,112286,24365,212,112287],"class_list":["post-277063","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-craft-and-advice","category-craftandcriticism","category-features","tag-daughterhood","tag-daughters","tag-house-of-anansi","tag-lantern","tag-poetics","tag-poetry","tag-sanna-wani","story-type-on-poetry"],"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p5rKFr-1a4L","jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/09\/light.jpg","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/277063","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/32224"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=277063"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/277063\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/277117"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=277063"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=277063"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=277063"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}},{"id":277443,"date":"2026-09-23T11:27:33","date_gmt":"2026-09-23T15:27:33","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/?p=277443"},"modified":"2026-09-23T11:27:33","modified_gmt":"2026-09-23T15:27:33","slug":"how-harry-styles-drove-a-bookseller-to-jail","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/how-harry-styles-drove-a-bookseller-to-jail\/","title":{"rendered":"How Harry Styles drove a bookseller to jail."},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Harry Styles, the amphibious pop star who&#8217;s just coming off a 30 day engagement at Madison Square Garden, has made a new enemy. And I&#8217;m not talking about Channing Tatum.<\/p>\n<p>Meet Bonnie Slotnick, beloved bookseller and purveyor of cookbooks in the East Village lo these many years. As the neighborhood blog <a href=\"https:\/\/evgrieve.com\/2026\/09\/line-tensions-boil-over-east-village.html\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">EV Grieve<\/a> reported last week, Slotnick was arrested on Friday following a confrontation with some of Styles&#8217; people.<\/p>\n<p>How did these worlds collide, you ask? Back in August, the singer&#8217;s team erected a pop-up merch shop on the same quiet downtown block that houses Slotnick&#8217;s <a href=\"http:\/\/www.bonnieslotnickcookbooks.com\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">cookbook store<\/a>, which has been in business for 30 years.<\/p>\n<p>Since its far more recent debut in the neighborhood, the Styles shop has drawn a mass of superfans to clog the sidewalks in the area as they wait for Harry. (New Yorkers are loving lines now; it&#8217;s a thing.) A line-management team featuring several security guards was summoned to keep the peace. But not for the long-time residents.<\/p>\n<p>As Slotnick told <a href=\"https:\/\/gothamist.com\/arts-entertainment\/after-a-harry-styles-pop-up-opened-nearby-a-bookstore-owner-was-arrested-what-happened\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Gothamist<\/a>, the pop-up has been particularly irksome for the block&#8217;s small businesses. \u201cI don\u2019t think the people standing in line, who are mostly from elsewhere, have any idea of the disruption they\u2019re causing,&#8221; she wrote in an email statement.<\/p>\n<p>Before Friday&#8217;s altercation, tension had been brewing between Slotnick and one particular guard for several weeks. As she told <em>EV Grieve<\/em>, on the day of the incident the Styles supporter was obstructing the place where Slotnick usually locks her bike. Angry words were exchanged, then Slotnick approached the guard with lock in hand.<\/p>\n<p>There was a tussle\u2014two respective wrists were bruised\u2014and someone cried &#8220;assault.&#8221;<\/p>\n<p>Slotnick subsequently spent 12 hours in custody. Neither she nor the guard appear to have sustained serious injuries, but the bookseller walked away with four counts\u2014including harassment and possession of a weapon.<\/p>\n<p>Though she doesn&#8217;t precisely defend her behavior, Slotnick told\u00a0Gothamist that conditions conspired. &#8220;The line has wreaked havoc on my mental state,\u201d she said. &#8220;I dread coming to work on the days that the pop-up is open, which is five days a week.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>Slotnick also told EV Grieve,<\/p>\n<p style=\"padding-left: 40px;\">I feel like what this story can turn into, or maybe is &#8230; a crabby old lady getting really mad at young people. And I don&#8217;t really need that to be my image any more than it already is.<\/p>\n<p style=\"padding-left: 40px;\">I want to make sure that whatever information comes out about this doesn&#8217;t damage my business. I don&#8217;t want people to be afraid of me, and I don&#8217;t want people to think that I&#8217;m crazy, or that I&#8217;m a Karen.<\/p>\n<p>For the record? I believe her! We don&#8217;t support violence, but Team Bonnie, all the way. Not least because her thoughtful selection of vintage titles has saved my ass come Christmas on three separate gifting occasions.<\/p>\n<p>But I also note the defense levied by peer indie booksellers. Noting the irksome, growing phenomenon of pop-up lines on quiet streets, an employee at <a href=\"https:\/\/www.instagram.com\/p\/DdjiB1lDuWI\/?hl=en&amp;img_index=1\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Left Hand Books<\/a> wrote that &#8220;these lines, mostly for corporate and private-equity backed businesses, impede traffic flows, obstruct small businesses and local residents, and don\u2019t arise as an organic expression of a given neighborhood\u2019s culture or street life.&#8221; Which, fair.<\/p>\n<p>According to <a href=\"https:\/\/gothamist.com\/arts-entertainment\/after-a-harry-styles-pop-up-opened-nearby-a-bookstore-owner-was-arrested-what-happened\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Gothamist<\/a>, Styles&#8217; people have yet to comment on the whole kerfuffle. But when it comes to Bonnie Slotnick&#8217;s place, maybe we should take a page from the singer&#8217;s lyric sheet and leave everything &#8220;As It Was.&#8221;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Harry Styles, the amphibious pop star who&#8217;s just coming off a 30 day engagement at Madison Square Garden, has made a new enemy. And I&#8217;m not talking about Channing Tatum. Meet Bonnie Slotnick, beloved bookseller and purveyor of cookbooks in<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":17066,"featured_media":277452,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"om_disable_all_campaigns":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[43105,43109,43092,43646],"tags":[112454,112453,53351,112455,11979],"class_list":["post-277443","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-bookstores-and-libraries","category-events","category-newsandculture","category-the-hub","tag-bonnie-slotnick-cookbooks","tag-free-bonnie","tag-harry-styles","tag-incident-report","tag-independent-bookstores"],"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p5rKFr-1aaT","jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/09\/Untitled-design-43.png","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/277443","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/17066"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=277443"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/277443\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/277452"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=277443"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=277443"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=277443"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}},{"id":277445,"date":"2026-09-23T11:13:31","date_gmt":"2026-09-23T15:13:31","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/?p=277445"},"modified":"2026-09-23T11:13:31","modified_gmt":"2026-09-23T15:13:31","slug":"judy-blume-and-ann-patchett-are-headlining-a-freedom-to-read-telethon","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/judy-blume-and-ann-patchett-are-headlining-a-freedom-to-read-telethon\/","title":{"rendered":"Judy Blume and Ann Patchett are headlining a freedom to read telethon."},"content":{"rendered":"<p>A group of right-to-read advocates and authors are hosting a live telethon tomorrow to draw attention to freedom to read issues and candidates before the midterms. <em>Show Up, Speak Up! Vote for the Freedom to Read<\/em> is a variety show that will be live-streamed on September 24 from 2:00-4:00 PM\u2014and it won\u2019t be recorded so you\u2019ll have to tune in live.<\/p>\n<p>The event is the combined effort of more than 35 organizations dedicated to literacy and freedom of expression. The show\u2019s line-up is a who\u2019s who of cool authors and right-to-read advocates, including Judy Blume, Ann Patchett, Jerrold Conners, Jerry Craft, Alan Gratz, Shannon Hale, Adib Khorram, Ellen Hopkins, Sarah MacLean, Don Martin, Edward Underhill, comedian Kat Radley, and Maris Kreizman.<\/p>\n<p>The event is built around a call for concerned citizens to <a href=\"https:\/\/secure.ngpvan.com\/2RRq_c3co06BHWF9mfj8DQ2\">activate and advocate<\/a>: \u201cSHOW UP by making a plan to vote, then SPEAK UP by calling our representatives together and sharing our commitment to the Freedom to Read.\u201d<\/p>\n<p><em><a href=\"https:\/\/www.publishersweekly.com\/pw\/by-topic\/industry-news\/libraries\/article\/101302-right-to-read-orgs-authors-to-show-up-speak-up-at-telethon.html\">Publishers Weekly<\/a> <\/em>spoke with a few of the organizers behind the event, including Authors Guild general counsel Cheryl L. Davis, who said the event hopes to drive people \u201cto be aware of what&#8217;s going on in their communities\u201d and to be educated \u201cas to the kinds of things to look for, and to use your voice, use your vote, to support causes.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>The event is free, and you can RSVP and read more on <a href=\"https:\/\/secure.ngpvan.com\/2RRq_c3co06BHWF9mfj8DQ2\">their webpage.<\/a><\/p>\n<p><em>Image from <a href=\"https:\/\/secure.ngpvan.com\/2RRq_c3co06BHWF9mfj8DQ2\">Red Wine &amp; Blue<\/a>.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>A group of right-to-read advocates and authors are hosting a live telethon tomorrow to draw attention to freedom to read issues and candidates before the midterms. Show Up, Speak Up! Vote for the Freedom to Read is a variety show<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":17056,"featured_media":277446,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"om_disable_all_campaigns":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[43201,43105,43109,43092,43095,43646],"tags":[71934,898,536,112451],"class_list":["post-277445","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-book-news-newsandculture","category-bookstores-and-libraries","category-events","category-newsandculture","category-politics","category-the-hub","tag-book-bans","tag-events","tag-politics","tag-right-to-read"],"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p5rKFr-1aaV","jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/09\/freedom-to-read.jpg","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/277445","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/17056"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=277445"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/277445\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/277446"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=277445"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=277445"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=277445"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}},{"id":277385,"date":"2026-09-23T09:49:00","date_gmt":"2026-09-23T13:49:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/?p=277385"},"modified":"2026-09-23T09:49:00","modified_gmt":"2026-09-23T13:49:00","slug":"two-great-works-of-art-to-ease-your-transition-into-autumn","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/two-great-works-of-art-to-ease-your-transition-into-autumn\/","title":{"rendered":"Two great works of art to ease your transition into autumn."},"content":{"rendered":"<p>To my fellow summer weary, too sweaty, beach-skeptical readers out there: We made it. We\u2019ve officially crossed the threshold into fall, and it feels great. Summer\u2019s brash extroversion is finally at an end and I\u2019m very much looking forward to putting on a light jacket, guzzling so much cider that my doctor makes a note in my chart, and gathering inside with friends.<\/p>\n<p>The earlier sunsets, chilled air, and approaching end of the year invite introspection, and I\u2019ve got two reflective recommendations\u2014a short film and a novella\u2014both about being inside with a small, temporary community and the sincerity that\u2019s possible when we share creativity.<\/p>\n<p>Usually when someone sings at a bar, it&#8217;s extremely annoying. But this isn&#8217;t the case in the gorgeous short film <em><a href=\"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/watch?v=t6GRNDF5veQ\">The Singers<\/a><\/em>, which tied for the best live action short Oscar last year (one of only <a href=\"https:\/\/www.vogue.com\/article\/brief-history-of-ties-at-the-oscars-since-1932\">seven ties<\/a> in Academy history). The film, a touching adaptation of an 1852 Turgenev <a href=\"https:\/\/www.gutenberg.org\/files\/8744\/8744-h\/8744-h.htm#chap17\">short story of the same name<\/a>, features an unconventional cast directed by a seasoned documentarian.<\/p>\n<p>The plot is pretty simple: a bartender at a quiet, locals-only bar offers $100 and free drinks to the bar&#8217;s best singer. The competition becomes a tender and funny musical showcase, with each character getting a revealing moment in the spotlight. I won\u2019t spoil it, but there are some genuinely jaw-dropping performances that culminate in a wonderful button\u2014I got to see this live and there was a huge laugh as the credits rolled.<\/p>\n<p>Director Sam Davis wanted to make <a href=\"https:\/\/variety.com\/2026\/artisans\/news\/the-singers-casting-tiktok-netflix-1236673604\/\">\u201ca love letter to the underdog,\u201d<\/a> and <a href=\"https:\/\/www.goldderby.com\/film\/2026\/the-singers-director-oscar-nominated-short-interview\/\">cast amateur singers<\/a> that his team found on social media. These are undiscovered talents who have gone viral once or twice, or had a shot on some reality singing show. Drawing on his background in documentary film, Davis worked without a traditional script, allowing the cast to improvise and bring themselves to their roles. One of the actors kept trying to sneak beers on set, which became part of the film. Another shared that he lost his wife\u2014this too became part of the film.<\/p>\n<p>All the performances were recorded in the bar and shot on 35 mm\u2014it&#8217;s a warm and intimate film. I was very moved by the way the masculine urge to turn singing into a bar competition, yields to something tender. What space opens up when we\u2019re willing to share something vulnerable?<\/p>\n<p>Like Turgenev\u2019s story, the film is a container for different characters, allowing the audience to draw their own constellations between the story\u2019s points. There\u2019s a similar dynamic in Buddhadeva Bose\u2019s 1951 novella <a href=\"https:\/\/bookshop.org\/p\/books\/my-kind-of-girl-buddhadeva-bose\/42a1ff68c4757ea2\"><i>My Kind of Girl<\/i><\/a>, a series of stories about youth and ill-fated love from four delayed travelers.<\/p>\n<p>The men are a Chaucerian cross section\u2014a contractor, a bureaucrat, a writer, and a doctor\u2014brought together on a cold night in a train station\u2019s waiting room. A young couple passes them by,\u00a0 inspiring the men to trade memories of early romance.<\/p>\n<p>The novella was written in a moment when much was changing in India. Bose published <em>My Kind of Girl <\/em>in 1951, soon after Partition and a year after the Indian Constitution went into effect. But the past the men are recalling in their stories would have been in the &#8217;20s or &#8217;30s, when the British were still colonizing the region, resistance was gaining strength, and cultural mores were shifting in India and around the globe.<\/p>\n<p>There\u2019s an aspect of insecure masculinity\u2014also present in the Turgenev and Davis <i>Singers<\/i>\u2014as these men find themselves in the unknowns of a national transition. Bose formally dramatizes what this must have felt like: here are middle class professionals waiting for a modern engine to take them forward.<\/p>\n<p>But the stories of love are the heart of the book, and each is a protracted sigh full of longing. As one of the men asks: \u201cIs the memory of happiness that has passed, happy or sad?\u201d The answer seems to be both. These aren\u2019t meet-cutes. The four romances are bittersweet, about love that is marked by melancholy, ends too soon, or never got a chance to begin.<\/p>\n<p>There is always a warmth to the stories, the unmistakable blush of first love. And the sharing affects both the teller and the audience\u2014my favorite moments of the book are when Bose brings us back to the waiting room after a story concludes, as the men sit together, the story lingering around them like the smoke of an extinguished cigarette.<\/p>\n<p>There is always a moment of small grief: facing the unrealized potential of a connection that never formed, because each of these men never knew the person they pined for, not truly: \u201cThe girl of our dreams, who lives in our heart, [he] wanted to see her for one time as a real person\u2014that is all that is real, all that matters, nothing else does.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>It\u2019s a relatable regret, a recognizable part of reckoning with time that has passed. The feeling that anything was possible reaches the cold, granite reality of an ending, as final as summer becomes fall.<\/p>\n<p><em>Images from <a href=\"https:\/\/www.imdb.com\/title\/tt33508491\/\">IMDB<\/a> and <\/em><a href=\"https:\/\/archipelagobooks.org\/book\/my-kind-of-girl\/\"><em>Archipelago Books<\/em><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>To my fellow summer weary, too sweaty, beach-skeptical readers out there: We made it. We\u2019ve officially crossed the threshold into fall, and it feels great. Summer\u2019s brash extroversion is finally at an end and I\u2019m very much looking forward to<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":17056,"featured_media":277388,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"om_disable_all_campaigns":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[43201,43093,43101,43094,43092,43646,43104],"tags":[24110,112428,13064,112427,15664,22553,107900],"class_list":["post-277385","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-book-news-newsandculture","category-film-and-tv","category-history","category-music","category-newsandculture","category-the-hub","category-travel","tag-autumn","tag-buddhadeva-bose","tag-ivan-turgenev","tag-my-kind-of-girl","tag-novella","tag-short-film","tag-the-singers"],"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p5rKFr-1a9X","jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/09\/bose-the-singers.jpg","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/277385","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/17056"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=277385"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/277385\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/277388"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=277385"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=277385"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=277385"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}},{"id":277375,"date":"2026-09-23T06:30:06","date_gmt":"2026-09-23T10:30:06","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/?p=277375"},"modified":"2026-09-23T09:12:28","modified_gmt":"2026-09-23T13:12:28","slug":"lit-hub-daily-september-23-2026","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/lit-hub-daily-september-23-2026\/","title":{"rendered":"Lit Hub Daily: September 23, 2026"},"content":{"rendered":"<span class=\"caption\"> TODAY: In\u00a01909, <em>The<\/em> <i>Phantom of the Opera <\/i>is first serialized in <i>Le Gaulois. <\/i><\/span>\n<ul>\n<li><a href=\"https:\/\/lithub.com\/fady-joudahs-meditation-on-language-and-time-under-genocide\/\">Bilal Urick considers Fady Joudah&#8217;s <em>Exhibit G<\/em><\/a>, a &#8220;poetic meditation on language and time, the basic structural forces of life, stripped of stability under genocide.\u201d | Lit Hub <a href=\"https:\/\/lithub.com\/category\/craftandcriticism\/literary-criticism\/\">Criticism<\/a><\/li>\n<li>Laura Kolbe on <a href=\"http:\/\/lithub.com\/in-praise-of-lost-time-on-a-poetics-that-subverts-linear-chronology\">the poetics of subverting linear time and<\/a> the derangement of &#8220;having an intimate, almost sensual relationship to the clock.&#8221; | Lit Hub <a href=\"https:\/\/lithub.com\/category\/craftandcriticism\/craft-and-advice\/\">Craft<\/a><\/li>\n<li>Sasha Dovzhyk recommends <a href=\"https:\/\/lithub.com\/10-essential-ukrainian-reads-from-memoir-to-novel\/\">essential Ukrainian literature by<\/a> Lesia Ukrainka, Victoria Amelina, Olena Stiazhkina, and more. | Lit Hub <a href=\"https:\/\/lithub.com\/category\/readinglists\/\">Reading Lists<\/a><\/li>\n<li>Cristin O\u2019Keefe Aptowicz chronicles the story of <a href=\"https:\/\/lithub.com\/the-true-story-of-the-actual-first-shot-fired-in-the-civil-war\/\">the actual first shot fired in the American Civil War<\/a>. | Lit Hub <a href=\"https:\/\/lithub.com\/category\/newsandculture\/history\/\">History<\/a><\/li>\n<li><a href=\"https:\/\/lithub.com\/the-joy-of-eavesdropping-as-a-bookseller-in-an-english-seaside-town\/\">What Katie Clapham&#8217;s overhead as a bookseller<\/a> from &#8220;the worst of all the swears&#8221; to wigglers. | Lit Hub <a href=\"https:\/\/lithub.com\/category\/newsandculture\/memoir\/\">Memoir<\/a><\/li>\n<li><a href=\"https:\/\/lithub.com\/what-learning-to-paint-and-reading-the-elements-of-style-have-in-common\/\">What does reading <em>The Elements of Style\u00a0<\/em>have in common with painting?<\/a> &#8220;The point is clear, elegant writing, of course, but equally important is to think and write visually.&#8221; | Lit Hub <a href=\"https:\/\/lithub.com\/category\/newsandculture\/art-and-photography\/\">Art<\/a><\/li>\n<li>How proportional democracy in Weimar Germany <a href=\"https:\/\/lithub.com\/how-weimar-germanys-proportional-democracy-put-hitler-in-power\/\">enabled Hitler&#8217;s rise to power<\/a>. | Lit Hub <a href=\"https:\/\/lithub.com\/category\/newsandculture\/history\/\">History<\/a><\/li>\n<li>&#8220;The American Academy of Pediatrics could not explain why Martin, at seven years old, rolled around on the living room floor flapping his arms and cawing, while Teddy, who was not yet five, waited placidly on the front walk.&#8221; Read from <a href=\"https:\/\/lithub.com\/avalon-rise\/\">Madeline ffitch&#8217;s new novel, <em>Avalon, Rise<\/em><\/a>. | Lit Hub <a href=\"https:\/\/lithub.com\/category\/fictionandpoetry\/from-the-novel\/\">Fiction<\/a><\/li>\n<li>\u201cHer life is like her work in at least one respect: it is far more difficult to dismiss once you\u2019ve actually engaged with it.\u201d <a href=\"https:\/\/www.newyorker.com\/magazine\/2026\/09\/28\/barbara-kingsolver-profile\">Casey Cep profiles Barbara Kingsolver<\/a>. | The New Yorker<\/li>\n<li><a href=\"https:\/\/www.poetryfoundation.org\/articles\/1827670\/to-darker-fields-we-go\">David Grundy remembers J.H. Prynne<\/a>, whose poetry encompassed political inquiry, unexpected slapstick, and the \u201cintentionally, genuinely weird.\u201d | Poetry<\/li>\n<li>Benjamin Moser talks to Krithika Varagur about <a href=\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2026\/09\/22\/plan-b-is-extremely-dangerous-benjamin-moser-on-anti-zionism\/\">tracing the history of anti-Zionism<\/a>. | The Paris Review<\/li>\n<li>Contractors OpenAI hired to train their AI have been fired\u2026<a href=\"https:\/\/www.404media.co\/people-training-openais-ai-fired-for-using-ai-to-train-the-ai\/\">for training the AI on AI.<\/a> | 404 Media<\/li>\n<li>Brad Bolman on rising tides and <a href=\"https:\/\/pioneerworks.org\/broadcast\/wet-places-nola-brad-bolman-oceans\">when land and sea meet in New Orleans<\/a>. | Broadcast<\/li>\n<li>Antonio Y. V\u00e1zquez-Arroyo remembers the \u201clucidity, courage, and a high degree of political literacy\u201d <a href=\"https:\/\/www.publicbooks.org\/the-poetics-of-social-forms-remembering-fredric-jameson-1934-2024\/\">of the late Fredric Jameson<\/a>. | Public Books<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Bilal Urick considers Fady Joudah&#8217;s Exhibit G, a &#8220;poetic meditation on language and time, the basic structural forces of life, stripped of stability under genocide.\u201d | Lit Hub Criticism Laura Kolbe on the poetics of subverting linear time and the<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":61,"featured_media":277387,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"om_disable_all_campaigns":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[45236],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-277375","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-lit-hub-daily"],"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p5rKFr-1a9N","jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/09\/phantom.jpg","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/277375","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/61"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=277375"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/277375\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/277387"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=277375"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=277375"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=277375"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}},{"id":277119,"date":"2026-09-23T05:09:51","date_gmt":"2026-09-23T09:09:51","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/?p=277119"},"modified":"2026-09-21T21:27:01","modified_gmt":"2026-09-22T01:27:01","slug":"the-true-story-of-the-actual-first-shot-fired-in-the-civil-war","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/the-true-story-of-the-actual-first-shot-fired-in-the-civil-war\/","title":{"rendered":"The True Story of the Actual First Shot Fired in the Civil War"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>It was the autumn of 1865\u2014a quiet, bitter autumn after four hollowing years of war\u2014when James Gilmore received a manuscript from a ghost. Well, not a ghost exactly. There\u2019d been rumors, of course, about what had become of William Parker. Some had him lynched in a dark woods. Others had him hacked to pieces in New York City. Still more had him living long enough to slaughter Confederates on Southern battlefields. But it had been nearly a decade and a half now since Parker vanished, and no one could ever truly prove what had become of him.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cCivil War\u2014The First Blow Struck,\u201d a local Pennsylvania newspaper had declared shortly after he\u2019d gone missing.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cUnless the Christiana rioters are hung&#8230;THE BONDS WILL BE DISSOLVED,\u201d a Southern broadsheet prophesied.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cThe partisans of slavery know that they stand upon a powder mine which may explode at any moment,\u201d proclaimed a scornful report from as far away as Sheffield, England, warning that the millions of Black people enslaved in the American South, just as William Parker had been, \u201conce aroused, cannot be subdued at a stroke.\u201d<\/p>\n<p class=\"pullquote\">Despite their differences\u2014in what they were risking and in what they themselves thought <i>reasonable<\/i>\u2014when it was important, they had each other\u2019s backs.<\/p>\n<p>America in 1851 was held together by the thinnest of compromises. The Mason-Dixon Line served not just as a demarcation separating the slave South from the free North but also as a fault line for a nation threatening to break itself in half.<\/p>\n<p>Here, less than a day\u2019s ride from that infamous boundary, a festering hostility toward the slave-catchers who stalked the hushed, racially integrated villages of rural Pennsylvania finally tipped over into what those involved would later call a \u201cbattle.\u201d This bloody standoff between enslavers and the formerly enslaved captured the attention of a deeply divided nation, filling newspapers with lurid accounts.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cWe have received a few additional particulars of the dreadful riot at Christiana,\u201d the <i>Evening Post <\/i>teased. \u201cThe owner of the slaves is named Edward Gorsuch, and he and his son Dickinson are both dead. There are besides twenty others dangerously wounded.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>\u201cThere were four men, all armed with pistols, it is true,\u201d the <i>Baltimore Sun <\/i>assured its readers, \u201copposed to about one hundred infuriated, blood-thirsty, howling demons.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>As the story unfurled, it showcased many familiar archetypes of a pre-Civil War America. There was Edward Gorsuch, the wealthy Maryland plantation owner and church elder; his handsome young son; and the bombastic Philadelphia police officer they\u2019d hired to lead them through unfamiliar territory in search of four men who had, in essence, stolen themselves to freedom. In the North, the story intersected with a surprisingly diverse society of radical abolitionists: well-known figures like Frederick Douglass, William Lloyd Garrison, and Lucretia Mott; but also Philadelphia\u2019s wealthy Black elite, obstructionist Quaker farmers, and the Black rebels themselves, led by their enigmatic leader, William Parker, a man whom it was rumored bullets could not kill.<\/p>\n<p>But the manuscript in James Gilmore\u2019s hands that day revealed elements of this story never before shared: the origins and outrageous adventures of Parker\u2019s armed Black mutual defense organization; their alliance with various white neighbors, including those who would be arrested alongside them in the battle\u2019s chaotic aftermath; and finally, the daring narratives of Parker\u2019s escapes, first from slavery and later from the enraged mobs and hastily deputized law enforcement officers who wanted to make good on the $2,000 bounty the governor of Pennsylvania himself had placed on Parker\u2019s head.<\/p>\n<p>The U.S. government descended on Parker\u2019s small town. Cattle cars would be used to ship dozens of Christiana men to a Philadelphia prison, where they would be charged en masse with \u201clevying war\u201d against their nation\u2014the largest federal indictment in the country\u2019s young history. The president himself would direct the prosecution\u2019s strategy from the White House, while the fearsome wit of congressman-attorney Thaddeus Stevens would bolster the defense. Each side aimed to sway the twelve white men on the Philadelphia jury as to what should be the fate of these traitorous \u201crioters\u201d\u2014and whether the only way to save an already riven nation was to set a proper example and send them to a hangman\u2019s noose.<\/p>\n<p>But missing among those prisoners was William Parker. As far as anyone knew for sure, shortly after the standoff he left his home, walked past the fly-covered bodies of white Marylanders bleeding in his front yard, and seemingly vanished into the hot September air.<\/p>\n<p>Now, fourteen years later\u2014after the shots that first rang out on Parker\u2019s front steps culminated in a war that left 700,000 Americans dead\u2014James Gilmore, editor-at-large of a new monthly magazine called <i>The Atlantic, <\/i>had received this manuscript offering to tell Parker\u2019s story. Could it be genuine, the memoirs of a man some thought dead? The manuscript had certainly come to the right place. In its eight-year existence, <i>The Atlantic <\/i>had already become a platform for many influential abolitionists. It published Julia Ward Howe\u2019s \u201cBattle Hymn of the Republic,\u201d the de facto anthem of the Union Army; Thomas Wentworth Higginson\u2019s compassionate reports on the slave revolts of Denmark Vessey and Nat Turner; and it would soon print Frederick Douglass\u2019s thoughts on the next steps for Black liberation. President Abraham Lincoln himself had once confided that a well-placed article in <i>The Atlantic <\/i>was \u201cworth as much to us as a half a dozen battles.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>Still, it was a strange moment in the nation\u2019s history for <i>The Atlantic <\/i>to receive this manuscript. The Civil War had ended only a few months earlier, and the new president, Tennessee\u2019s Andrew Johnson, believed that the future of the country depended on its citizens being <i>reasonable <\/i>in their expectations moving forward. He encouraged Americans to embrace reconciliation and compromise and let old hurts go. Johnson\u2019s choice not to reconvene Congress in the months after Lincoln\u2019s assassination allowed him to issue thousands of pardons to former Confederates\u2014blanket amnesty proclamations, as well as individual pardons for high-ranking officials, scheming bureaucrats, and wealthy plantation owners\u2014and to welcome Confederate states back into the Union under lenient terms, with no oversight. And all this was without any movement toward a federal plan for the rights now owed to <i>four and a half million <\/i>Black Americans\u2014four million of whom, until emancipation, had known only a life of enslavement.<\/p>\n<p class=\"pullquote\">Theirs is a story of twists and turns, of progress followed by devastating reversals, of faith kept alive until the beliefs most of their era would consider <i>radical <\/i>could one day become the rights an entire world would come to see as <i>American<\/i>.<\/p>\n<p>Publishing Parker\u2019s story would not just challenge the pervasive historical amnesia settling in all around Gilmore\u2014for heaven\u2019s sake, the Southern states planned on sending former Confederate leaders to Congress, as if their rebellion had been a minor indiscretion and not treason!\u2014but also serve as a rebuke of Johnson\u2019s plea for docile reasonableness.<\/p>\n<p>*<\/p>\n<p>\u201cThe reasonable man adapts himself to the world, the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself,\u201d Irish playwright George Bernard Shaw would later write, \u201ctherefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>The story of what would be called \u201cThe Christiana Riot\u201d is a tale of unreasonable men and women who tried to change the world around them, the many ways they failed, and the important ways they succeeded. It\u2019s the story of what happened outside William Parker\u2019s house in the dawn hours of September 11, 1851. But it\u2019s also a much larger story involving decades of tenacious, ever-evolving anti-slavery and Black rights efforts spread out across Philadelphia and rural southeastern Pennsylvania\u2014activist communities divided by class and race, but connected in spirited defiance of laws they knew to be unjust and inhumane. These men and women weren\u2019t perfect: Mistakes were made, innocent people were hurt, and long-fought-for progress was stymied, or worse, rolled back. Words of anger were expressed in print, spat out in person, and hollered from pulpits and podiums. And yet, despite their differences\u2014in what they were risking and in what they themselves thought <i>reasonable<\/i>\u2014when it was important, they had each other\u2019s backs.<\/p>\n<p>Theirs is a story of twists and turns, of progress followed by devastating reversals, of faith kept alive until the beliefs most of their era would consider <i>radical <\/i>could one day become the rights an entire world would come to see as <i>American<\/i>.<\/p>\n<p>In other words, it\u2019s the story of how a nation is moved to change its mind.<\/p>\n<p>*<\/p>\n<p>\u201cThe manuscript of the following pages has been handed to me with the request that I would revise it for publication,\u201d Gilmore wrote in his introduction to the piece. \u201cThe narrative is a plain and unpretending account of the life of a man whose own right arm\u2014to use his own expression\u2014won his rights as a freeman. It is written with the utmost simplicity, and has about it the verisimilitude which belongs to truth, and to truth only when told by one who has been a doer of the deeds and an actor in the scenes which he describes.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>After summarizing the battle at Christiana\u2014its harrowing genesis and its staggering aftermath\u2014Gilmore grew worried he was \u201cholding the reader at the threshold.\u201d He needed to get out of the way and let the citizens of this newly reunited nation learn from Parker\u2019s story whatever lessons it needed to teach them\u2014that it needed to teach <i>us<\/i>.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cWith these few remarks, I submit the evidence,\u201d Gilmore penned, \u201cto that impartial grand jury, the American people.\u201d<\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: center;\">____________________________<\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: center;\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" data-attachment-id=\"277120\" data-permalink=\"https:\/\/lithub.com\/the-true-story-of-the-actual-first-shot-fired-in-the-civil-war\/the-ballad-of-the-fugitive-william-parker-9781668035931_lg\/\" data-orig-file=\"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/09\/the-ballad-of-the-fugitive-william-parker-9781668035931_lg.jpg\" data-orig-size=\"264,400\" data-comments-opened=\"1\" data-image-meta=\"{&quot;aperture&quot;:&quot;0&quot;,&quot;credit&quot;:&quot;&quot;,&quot;camera&quot;:&quot;&quot;,&quot;caption&quot;:&quot;&quot;,&quot;created_timestamp&quot;:&quot;0&quot;,&quot;copyright&quot;:&quot;&quot;,&quot;focal_length&quot;:&quot;0&quot;,&quot;iso&quot;:&quot;0&quot;,&quot;shutter_speed&quot;:&quot;0&quot;,&quot;title&quot;:&quot;&quot;,&quot;orientation&quot;:&quot;0&quot;,&quot;alt&quot;:&quot;&quot;}\" data-image-title=\"the-ballad-of-the-fugitive-william-parker-9781668035931_lg\" data-image-description=\"\" data-image-caption=\"\" data-large-file=\"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/09\/the-ballad-of-the-fugitive-william-parker-9781668035931_lg.jpg\" class=\"alignnone size-medium wp-image-277120\" src=\"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/09\/the-ballad-of-the-fugitive-william-parker-9781668035931_lg-198x300.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"198\" height=\"300\" srcset=\"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/09\/the-ballad-of-the-fugitive-william-parker-9781668035931_lg-198x300.jpg 198w, https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/09\/the-ballad-of-the-fugitive-william-parker-9781668035931_lg-40x60.jpg 40w, https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/09\/the-ballad-of-the-fugitive-william-parker-9781668035931_lg-33x50.jpg 33w, https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/09\/the-ballad-of-the-fugitive-william-parker-9781668035931_lg.jpg 264w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 198px) 100vw, 198px\" \/><\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: center;\"><em>From<\/em> <a href=\"https:\/\/bookshop.org\/a\/132\/9781668035931\">The Ballad of the Fugitive William Parker: A True Tale of Love, Murder, Treason, and Ordinary Folks Who Saved America<\/a> <em>by Cristin O&#8217;Keefe Aptowicz. Copyright <i>\u00a9<\/i> 2026. Available from Simon &amp; Schuster.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>It was the autumn of 1865\u2014a quiet, bitter autumn after four hollowing years of war\u2014when James Gilmore received a manuscript from a ghost. Well, not a ghost exactly. There\u2019d been rumors, of course, about what had become of William Parker.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":32235,"featured_media":277191,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"om_disable_all_campaigns":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[6,43101,43092],"tags":[13964,13038,1919,7596,731,2727,112304],"class_list":["post-277119","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-features","category-history","category-newsandculture","tag-19th-century","tag-american-history","tag-civil-war","tag-cristin-okeefe-aptowicz","tag-simon-and-schuster","tag-slavery","tag-the-ballad-of-the-fugitive-william-parker-a-true-tale-of-love-murder-treason-and-ordinary-folks-who-saved-america","story-type-american-history"],"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p5rKFr-1a5F","jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/09\/1851_Christiana_Tragedy_print-1.png","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/277119","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/32235"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=277119"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/277119\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/277191"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=277119"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=277119"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=277119"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}},{"id":277057,"date":"2026-09-23T05:09:04","date_gmt":"2026-09-23T09:09:04","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/?p=277057"},"modified":"2026-09-22T21:22:35","modified_gmt":"2026-09-23T01:22:35","slug":"the-joy-of-eavesdropping-as-a-bookseller-in-an-english-seaside-town","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/the-joy-of-eavesdropping-as-a-bookseller-in-an-english-seaside-town\/","title":{"rendered":"The Joy of Eavesdropping as a Bookseller in an English Seaside Town"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><em>Friday, September 6<\/em><strong><br \/>\n<\/strong>Honestly, the first thing I heard this morning as someone walked past the bookshop door I cannot even type because it includes the worst of all the swears, but I will tell you that it was in the sentence &#8220;and then she called my mum\u00a0 a \u2014&#8221; and it sounded like that was just one thing in a long list of things that she did. So, really, who is the \u2014?<\/p>\n<p>First lady through the door asks about books by Ray Mears. I haven\u2019t heard that name for a while, I say, like someone in a smoky bar in a black-and-white film.<\/p>\n<p>&#8220;But he\u2019s still relevant!&#8221; the customer says. We look at the catalogue to see what books are available and it turns out he published one earlier this year about British woodland, which, honestly, we should have had in because that\u2019s the sort of thing that just sells. I\u2019ve got one coming in the next order, but not for the customer, who said she was going home to research the other Ray Mears books, and assured me that she wouldn\u2019t buy them online; she will come back and order them with me. Really, she is a lot like Ray Mears herself: concerned with survival.<\/p>\n<p>A new customer takes some time browsing every inch of the bookshop, making a beautiful pile of purchases at the till. I\u2019m thrilled with the selection, which includes some impeccable middle-grade fiction, hardback picture-book perfection and one of my favorite childhood books, Joan <i>Aiken\u2019s A Necklace of Raindrops<\/i>. It\u2019s probably been a few years since we last sold this book, but I\u2019m immediately reordering it because it should always be available to happen to someone else.<\/p>\n<p class=\"pullquote\">I live in the constant shadow of all the books I said I was excited to read and didn\u2019t get round to actually reading for another three years.<\/p>\n<p>Dog on lead tries to enter the shop. Owner pulls it back. Owner\u2019s companion says, &#8220;Does he want a book?&#8221; and laughs, but, like, what if he does?<\/p>\n<p><em>&#8220;<\/em><i>Look, Theresa May has written a book. <\/i>The Abuse of\u00a0 Power\u2014<i>I should put that one in my staff room!&#8221;<\/i><\/p>\n<p>A chain gang of toddlers, hitched together with neon straps, en route to the beach from a nearby nursery, go past the bookshop with their responsible adults. &#8220;Are you a big book reader?&#8221; I hear one of them ask an impossibly small boy. &#8220;Yep!&#8221; he says. Good lad.<\/p>\n<p>A customer who tells me they don\u2019t have any grandchildren of appropriate ages still wants to look around the children\u2019s books. <i>No explanation necessary<\/i>, I say, as a person who has bought children\u2019s books for herself at every age. The customer buys a picture book and two finger puppets, and I am delighted for her.<\/p>\n<p>Business Mum arrives with The Goods. The Goods being three miniature cakes (we share them) and two miniature coffees.<\/p>\n<p>Minutes after BM leaves, a customer arrives who would definitely prefer that she was here. He loves a chat with her, but today he\u2019s got me. I sell him his books, and he gets his loyalty discount. We manage a quick chat about his purchases. He\u2019s buying Rumer Godden\u2019s <i>The Greengage Summer<\/i>, which I also intend to read one day. He hasn\u2019t yet heard anything about it\u2014he prefers to order things from the editions he likes (either Penguin Little Clothbound, or Macmillan Collector\u2019s Library) without reading any synopses or reviews, to broaden his reading. I say he\u2019s brave and he says, &#8220;You win some, you lose some,&#8221; which is also true when you read synopses and reviews.<\/p>\n<p><i>&#8220;I just really do love bookshops.&#8221;<\/i>\u00a0(Gliding past. Not even tempted to come in. A classic.)<\/p>\n<p>A lady comes to ask me about slow-cooker recipe books. We don\u2019t have one on the shelf today, because all anyone talks about is frying things in air. But we\u2019re definitely moving into Slow-Cooker Season, aren\u2019t we? Yes, with the ghosts of autumn, so come the stews. The customer can\u2019t decide which book sounds good and hopes her daughter might have an opinion, since it was she who insisted her mother get a slow cooker in the first place. She says she\u2019s really grateful to me for showing her what is available, and before she goes off to ring her daughter she reaches over the desk and squeezes my arm, so I know she really means it.<\/p>\n<p>A man all in khaki enters the shop (imagine Ray Mears). He\u2019s got khaki walking trousers with lots of pockets, a khaki shirt, a khaki zip-up gilet with lots of pockets and a wide-brimmed hat (khaki). He buys <i>The Salt Path<\/i> by Raynor Winn, which seems like a very khaki choice to me.<\/p>\n<p><i>&#8220;It\u2019s just&#8230;storytellers in there. That\u2019s no use to me.&#8221;<\/i><\/p>\n<p>One person enters the shop, followed by a family, followed by a couple, followed by a pair of teens. Suddenly we\u2019re overrun with people, who all descend on the shop at the same time, despite not being together. A little girl is offered &#8220;one <i>or<\/i> the other&#8221; and replies, &#8220;We should just take both.&#8221; She\u2019s right, of course. We sell three books.<\/p>\n<p class=\"pullquote\">I guess some days your destiny is just to meet your wiggler in the right place at the right time.<\/p>\n<p>A shopper with a child asks me to put the purchase of two books in two separate bags so the child can carry her book herself. The child has not asked to carry her own book in a separate bag, and the book is a large picture book, so it has to go in a separate normal-sized carrier bag. Both bags cost us money, but I do not charge for either of them because I gave the first one for free\u2014I was so glad of the sale. Asking for payment for the second would have sounded really petty, but there\u2019s literally no way this small child will be carrying this bag for more than ten seconds at most and the mark-up on books is really not that much, people!<\/p>\n<p>A boy who used to come to my JUNIOR book club comes into the shop because he\u2019s back from university and now he has a BEARD. I am creaking towards the grave.<\/p>\n<p>A middle-aged couple come into the bookshop and I\u2019ve decided they\u2019re on a date. The way they whisper like this is a library. She giggles. Perhaps they\u2019ve just been for lunch. Lunch with wine. But perhaps I\u2019m being short-sighted and this is a happy marriage? Laughing together in the bookshop, little glances. Then he asks her, &#8220;Have you ever read John Grisham?&#8221; and I <i>know<\/i> this is him flirting. They\u2019re not married. Not yet.<\/p>\n<p><em>Friday, September 13<\/em><strong><br \/>\n<\/strong>Earlier this week I unpacked the Richard Osman poster. The Richard Osman window cling. The Richard Osman standee. The Richard Osman bunting. Not a euphemism. Apparently, he\u2019s got a new book out. To be clear, the standee is of the fox logo from <i>The Thursday Murder Club<\/i> series, not a life-size cardboard cut-out of\u00a0 Osman himself.<\/p>\n<p>The first customer wants the Complete Works of Balzac not new Richard Osman. I ask if she\u2019s going to start reading it today. She says yes. I\u2019ll ask this of all the customers buying this book today, only because it makes me extraordinarily happy to think of someone going home to immediately start reading a book they\u2019ve been waiting for. This doesn\u2019t happen to me, because I live in the constant shadow of all the books I said I was excited to read and didn\u2019t get round to actually reading for another three years. Why I ever pre-order hardbacks for myself is completely beyond me. Nevertheless, she persisted&#8230;<\/p>\n<p>Next customer is one of my favorites because he brings his order complete with his contact details written out, which means no one (me) is in danger of writing them down wrong. Today he\u2019s ordering some art books, and we go through the Taschen catalogue to see which ones he\u2019s interested in. This means I am tested on my pronunciation of lots of famous artists and I think I do OK.<\/p>\n<p>A customer wants to look at the hand puppets. I show her the big selection and the basket of smaller hand puppets, then leave her to browse in case she wants to try any of them on and do funny voices in private. Before long she approaches the till with a puppet that I genuinely haven\u2019t seen for months. &#8220;I was looking for something that is not a real animal,&#8221; she says.<\/p>\n<p>&#8220;Well,&#8221; I say, &#8220;this is&#8230;a wiggler!&#8221; Somehow, she\u2019s found the only one in the whole shop. It must have been lurking at the bottom of the basket. I guess some days your destiny is just to meet your wiggler in the right place at the right time.<\/p>\n<p>A lady comes into the shop and leaves her husband and dog outside. I say, &#8220;You can bring him in!&#8221; and she doesn\u2019t even make a funny joke about her husband molting all over the books or sniffing the other customers\u2019 legs. Anyway, the husband does enter with the dog and then says, &#8220;You\u2019re allowed in, Charlie! She obviously doesn\u2019t know you&#8230;&#8221; Charlie is a very good boy and when he tries to mount the desk the lady says, &#8220;He thinks any shop he\u2019s allowed in must have treats for him at the till,&#8221; which is actually very constructive feedback.<\/p>\n<p>I am surprising some of my Osman pre-order customers with signed editions because&#8230;I forgot to tell them I\u2019d ordered signed copies!<\/p>\n<p>One customer glances at the signature page and says, &#8220;He didn\u2019t take too much time to do that, did he?&#8221; It\u2019s not a great signature, but so few are. He will have had to sign <i>thousands<\/i> of these things; at least his squiggle has the gist of an R.<\/p>\n<p>I tell the disappointed man about the time we ordered signed Oliver Jeffers books, only to learn that Jeffers had broken his arm around the time of signing and had simply drawn an X inside instead.<\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: center;\">____________________________<\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: center;\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" data-attachment-id=\"277058\" data-permalink=\"https:\/\/lithub.com\/the-joy-of-eavesdropping-as-a-bookseller-in-an-english-seaside-town\/receipts-from-the-bookshop\/\" data-orig-file=\"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/09\/receipts-from-the-bookshop.png\" data-orig-size=\"600,911\" data-comments-opened=\"1\" data-image-meta=\"{&quot;aperture&quot;:&quot;0&quot;,&quot;credit&quot;:&quot;&quot;,&quot;camera&quot;:&quot;&quot;,&quot;caption&quot;:&quot;&quot;,&quot;created_timestamp&quot;:&quot;0&quot;,&quot;copyright&quot;:&quot;&quot;,&quot;focal_length&quot;:&quot;0&quot;,&quot;iso&quot;:&quot;0&quot;,&quot;shutter_speed&quot;:&quot;0&quot;,&quot;title&quot;:&quot;&quot;,&quot;orientation&quot;:&quot;0&quot;,&quot;alt&quot;:&quot;&quot;}\" data-image-title=\"receipts from the bookshop\" data-image-description=\"\" data-image-caption=\"\" data-large-file=\"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/09\/receipts-from-the-bookshop.png\" class=\"alignnone size-medium wp-image-277058\" src=\"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/09\/receipts-from-the-bookshop-198x300.png\" alt=\"\" width=\"198\" height=\"300\" srcset=\"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/09\/receipts-from-the-bookshop-198x300.png 198w, https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/09\/receipts-from-the-bookshop-40x60.png 40w, https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/09\/receipts-from-the-bookshop-33x50.png 33w, https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/09\/receipts-from-the-bookshop.png 600w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 198px) 100vw, 198px\" \/><\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: center;\"><em>From<\/em> <a href=\"https:\/\/bookshop.org\/a\/132\/9780063516625\">Receipts from the Bookshop: A Bookseller&#8217;s Year in an English Seaside Town<\/a> <em>by Katie Clapham. Copyright \u00a9 2026. Available from William Morrow, an imprint of HarperCollins Publishers.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Friday, September 6 Honestly, the first thing I heard this morning as someone walked past the bookshop door I cannot even type because it includes the worst of all the swears, but I will tell you that it was in<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":32223,"featured_media":277406,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"om_disable_all_campaigns":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[43105,6,43103,43092],"tags":[306,18997,58,10182,56926,112285,112284,19646,15438],"class_list":["post-277057","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-bookstores-and-libraries","category-features","category-memoir","category-newsandculture","tag-booksellers","tag-bookselling","tag-bookstores","tag-england","tag-harpercollins-publishers","tag-katie-clapham","tag-receipts-from-the-bookshop-a-booksellers-year-in-an-english-seaside-town","tag-united-kingdom","tag-william-morrow","story-type-bookstores"],"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p5rKFr-1a4F","jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/09\/st-annes-on-sea.png","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/277057","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/32223"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=277057"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/277057\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/277406"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=277057"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=277057"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=277057"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}},{"id":276963,"date":"2026-09-23T05:08:57","date_gmt":"2026-09-23T09:08:57","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/?p=276963"},"modified":"2026-09-23T13:06:59","modified_gmt":"2026-09-23T17:06:59","slug":"fady-joudahs-meditation-on-language-and-time-under-genocide","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/fady-joudahs-meditation-on-language-and-time-under-genocide\/","title":{"rendered":"Fady Joudah\u2019s Meditation on Language and Time Under Genocide"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Fady Joudah\u2019s <em>Exhibit G<\/em> is among the first of its kind. The multimedia poetry collection\u2014assembled in the diaspora, and yet, across form, content, and voice, never anywhere but Gaza\u2014charts Palestinian life under genocide.<\/p>\n<p><em>Exhibit G<\/em> continues Joudah\u2019s poetic meditation on language and time, the basic structural forces of life, stripped of stability under genocide. Where Joudah\u2019s <em>[&#8230;]<\/em> (2024) dwelt in silence and its residues, <em>Exhibit G <\/em>constitutes the utterance ultimately yielded by the refusal of certain speech. Confronted with the impossibility of ensuring its people\u2019s survival tomorrow, the \u201cExhibit\u201d assumes a polyphonic form in the language of Gaza.<\/p>\n<p>A collaboration among Joudah\u2014a Palestinian physician and poet from Gaza, based in Houston, Texas\u2014Palestinian poets writing from and about Gaza, and the Gaza Soup Kitchen alongside the Gazan photographers documenting its work, the collection answers the need for a renewed poetics as Palestine struggles to endure in English and Arabic alike. Moving across poems, essays, photographs, and drawings, <em>Exhibit G <\/em>gathers the many hands, faces, and odes of a people feeding, burying, and naming itself as the US-Israeli genocide persists, unrelenting, from the 1948 Nakba to its present horrors.<\/p>\n<p>Joudah sits with a single letter\u2014\u201cG\u201d\u2014that lingers on the tongue in the moment before utterance. The \u201cG\u201d of genocide, the \u201cG\u201d of Gaza in English, becomes here a disinterred horizon, a grammar of ghurbah (Arabic for exile or alienation) and ghur\u016bb (Arabic for setting or decline). The sun rises and sets ceaselessly in the West; its light refuses Palestinian shores, the visible landscape and its accompanying clock forced into another reality of perpetual darkness. Neither a museum nor an exhibition nor a criminal case document, <em>Exhibit G<\/em> highlights Gaza\u2019s unceasing endurance, counter to the fleeting \u201cexhibit\u201d that has been made of Palestinian suffering under the Western sun. The result is a formidable journey through committed verse necessarily without a clear exit for the reader.<\/p>\n<p>In the reality of genocide, Joudah and his interlocutors construct a Palestinian poetry through the ceaseless demands of stable time, lineage, and language, now destroyed. Lab\u012bd\u2014at the beginning of our Arabic poetic heritage\u2014reminds us that time, still, is always at hand. For the war of empires, the battle of time between \u201cpre-\u201d and \u201cpost-\u201d, has been ours since before we knew it:<\/p>\n<p style=\"padding-left: 40px;\">\u062f\u0650\u0645\u064e\u0646\u064c \u062a\u064e\u062c\u064e\u0631\u0651\u064e\u0645\u064e \u0628\u064e\u0639\u062f\u064e \u0639\u064e\u0647\u062f\u0650 \u0623\u064e\u0646\u064a\u0633\u0650\u0647\u0627\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 \u062d\u0650\u062c\u064e\u062c\u064c \u062e\u064e\u0644\u064e\u0648\u0646\u064e \u062d\u064e\u0644\u0627\u0644\u064f\u0647\u0627 \u0648\u064e\u062d\u064e\u0631\u0627\u0645\u064f\u0647\u0627<\/p>\n<p style=\"padding-left: 40px;\">Dark and dirt-trodden now lie their grounds, their people, gone with<br \/>\nyears past, months both sacred and profane.<\/p>\n<p>Joudah, indeed, walks along a timeline similarly disfigured by its own passage. Between the Arabic of Palestine and his English in the United States, Fady Joudah tells us that he cannot \u201cturn off time\u201d as it courses through <em>Exhibit G<\/em>. The dirt of Lab\u012bd\u2019s ode, in its years, struggles to speak through the broken West\u2019s enforced silence:<\/p>\n<p style=\"padding-left: 40px;\">Because no oxygen for the dead.<br \/>\nThen they came for the dirt, and the dirt had no lips, so they tossed our corpses in the street<\/p>\n<p style=\"padding-left: 80px;\">\u2013\u201cTruth is Never Finished,\u201d (10).<\/p>\n<p>The \u201cnever\u201d of Joudah\u2019s title maintains its crevices in this Exhibit, into which the people and months, sacred and together, enter. And still, his opening words speak:<\/p>\n<p style=\"padding-left: 40px;\">And a world we want to begin begins:<br \/>\nI turned my love for you into art,<br \/>\nthat I may triumph over death (1).<\/p>\n<p>Gaza emerges as a language of Palestine unto itself\u2014a new beginning, the final and only utterance of the single \u201cG.\u201d Engaged in a poetic tradition whose words now filter between Israeli bombs and smiles condemned to life under rubble, Joudah and his partners in Gaza \u201ctriumph\u201d against the global attempt to confine Palestine to the erasure captured in Lab\u012bd\u2019s \u201ctheir people, gone.\u201d Here, not only those writing in other lands, like Joudah himself, must confront their distance from the accumulating ruins; but those under the bombs must likewise push through the endless checkpoints\u2014material and linguistic\u2014separating them from the Gaza they knew. The \u201cExhibit\u201d thus speaks in the language of Nakba\u2014of genocide as it ensues, all over, and again.<\/p>\n<p>As the collection meanders between voices and moments in Gaza, Joudah struggles against the finality of genocide through the \u201cWhat yet?\u201d of his eponymously titled poem, \u201cExhibit G: Surviving Image\u201d:<\/p>\n<p style=\"padding-left: 40px;\">Good love will be bread. Water before love.<br \/>\n\u201cWho smiles when marked for extermination?\u201d<br \/>\nWho asks this? The image<br \/>\nof the unforgettable to you. Who wants proof<br \/>\nof what went too far but did not go far enough?<br \/>\nWhat yet?\u201d (24).<\/p>\n<p>The collection searches for all that is left of Gaza through the tormenting mix of rubble in sound and silence, survival brought forth in the glottal \u201cG\u201d stuck in our throats. Images from Gaza look back at us across the book\u2019s spine, uncertain, not necessarily representations of the poems they meet. On the page across from Joudah\u2019s poem \u201cSalaam, Ya Salaam,\u201d the reader sees a photograph of a woman flashing an incomplete smile. This version of \u201cSalaam\u201d appears on the page with her name written in verse fractured by Israel\u2019s genocide:<\/p>\n<p style=\"padding-left: 40px;\">Israel killed his younger brother, sister-in-law, and three of their four<br \/>\nchildren: The daughter who survived: Salaam.<br \/>\nTheir corpses could not be retrieved. Rubble and snipers. In lieu of grief,<br \/>\nmy friend decided to start a soup kitchen during the annihilation.<br \/>\nFamily and friends will run it, he said, my youngest brother and<br \/>\nmy sister. Israel would later assassinate his youngest brother. He would be<br \/>\nBuried. Salaam would go on to have a baby girl.<\/p>\n<p style=\"padding-left: 80px;\">\u2013\u201cExhibit G: Surviving Image\u201d (14).<\/p>\n<p>What survives for Salaam is not herself, but first, what \u201cIsrael killed.\u201d Joudah\u2019s colons still refuse closure and further complicate the form of linear time and space. The in-between grammar of \u201cG\u201d endures in the \u201cdecided\u201d of once choosing to \u201cstart a soup kitchen\u201d for life. It is also sustained in the faces and smiles in photographs, but they are not the images \u201cyou reposted.\u201d \u201cG,\u201d Gaza, where \u201ccould not\u201d becomes the devastation of bodies never retrieved. The unmade ruins of the future arrive in \u201cwould be \/ Buried\u201d, once the simplest dignity, now a distant wish itself. \u201cSalaam\u201d still goes on, into the winds, the foregone and the young, and breathes anew against a watchful end, only known in extermination.<\/p>\n<p>\u201c\u2026 [D]uring the annihilation years,\u201d Gaza arrives as \u201cA fascicle: in parallel, in sphincters, convergent, or pennate\u201d (19). The fascicle: the locus of structural organization, of poetry, its lines; of hunger, its lines; of tradition, its lines; of bombs, the imperial re-ordering of the world into lineages under murderous imperatives; and medically, of nerves, the interior made exterior, bunched into one, together. In<em> Exhibit G<\/em>, the physician-poet mobilizes the fascicle to map the temporal and spatial dimensions of Palestinian togetherness\u2014a collectivity constituted under, and repeatedly fractured by, a world predicated on Palestine\u2019s extermination. It is the throbbing meeting-place of a land from which Joudah hails, now only reached through his surname in the lists of martyrs. It is Palestine in \u201cG\u201d, a people forced into the unrelentingly coherent sounds of Gaza as Genocide and Grammar and Ghur\u016bb and Ghurbah:<\/p>\n<p style=\"padding-left: 40px;\">To stand in line and shout, beg, howl, grin from ear to ear, feel, feel, feel.<br \/>\nThe time before and after food is merriment within internment. Kids<br \/>\ndressed up in their best remaining clothes and shoes. Their favorite<br \/>\npajamas. Or the only one left\u00a0(19).<\/p>\n<p>\u201cTo feel\u201d the \u201cTime before and after food,\u201d another measurement of life, marred. \u201cBefore and after food\u201d no longer follows the periods before dawn and after dusk, the horizon line no longer visible under bombs. Language is felt through the fall and rise that lingers as it should not:<\/p>\n<p style=\"padding-left: 40px;\">What free fall and what ascension.<br \/>\nWhat accrues in the kids\u2019 memories is stored in their bodies. What\u2019s stored<br \/>\nin their bodies is a beginning of love stored in time.<br \/>\nToo many Palestinians are a beginning of love stored in time (19).<\/p>\n<p>Joudah\u2019s poetics require a constant recourse in return. \u201cBeginnings\u201d are multiple, and as Joudah tells us, they are inevitably Palestinian.<\/p>\n<p>The poem tries desperately to make real what cannot <em>be<\/em>. Another beginning arrives: a hanging, standalone \u201cthe,\u201d rarely separated from its nominal partner in Arabic, finds itself left at the surviving edge of imperial English. This tongue spits noise audible only to those forced into the world\u2019s cruelest habits:<\/p>\n<p style=\"padding-left: 40px;\">The<br \/>\ndrones overhead, the white noise of genocide (19).<\/p>\n<p>Genocide in Gaza becomes the sounds of the unforgiving sky above. Gaza\u2019s people sit at the hanging edge of Joudah\u2019s \u201cThe,\u201d as the definite article leans toward a sky made whole not by the commercial planes and idle ceiling fans, but drones of drumming death:<\/p>\n<p style=\"padding-left: 40px;\">Another marker: to become the emblem of humanity\u2019s call to all peoples (20).<\/p>\n<p>The light of a negated Palestinian horizon here fades, and with it,<\/p>\n<p style=\"padding-left: 40px;\">The aleph of dimming souls, may the good Lord shield you from it, sees<br \/>\nresistance to injustice as the cause of ruin, and not the injustice (24).<\/p>\n<p>Joudah marks the time of genocide and the genocide of time through language in which ruins arrive first. The invocation of the Hebrew \u201caleph\u201d marks the displacement of the poet\u2019s Arabic language. The Arabic \u201calif,\u201d if transliterated into English cannot\u2014will not\u2014engage with the wanton destruction. The rubble is not its own. The Arabic \u201calif\u201d first recalls and stretches outward: it opens the alphabet and asks questions, tries to meet the letters that can together articulate Joudah\u2019s \u201cI,\u201d rarely welcomed throughout the collection. The Hebrew \u201caleph\u201d thus commences the poem\u2019s ultimate demise in form and practice, a skeletal language counter to Gaza\u2019s Arabic poetic heritage. The Palestinian \u201cI\u201d may only gain entry into the linear space of poetic life only once already dead, marshaled in by the Hebrew that readied the continual Nakba. \u201cAnd you reposted it,\u201d says Joudah. The Arabic \u201calif\u201d cannot be the breath,<\/p>\n<p style=\"padding-left: 40px;\">The incinerated<br \/>\nair the people breathe\u00a0(24).<\/p>\n<p>And we hear the cries of Shaban al-Dalou. Israel\u2019s genocide twists Gaza into the incinerators of holocaust, our airways overtaken by language crafted against Palestinian life. Israel\u2019s bombs consume the nineteen-year-old boy, breathing his own skin as it burns with his bed. A social media post distributes Shaban\u2019s gruesome death before he receives his engineering degree.<\/p>\n<p><em>Exhibit G<\/em> seeks to recuperate an alternative chronology uninhibited by the West\u2019s dark ghur\u016bb over Gaza, a lexical order that honors Palestine before its unjust abandon. The Exhibit itself opens unto the abrasions of language\u2014of an English whose decided holders refuse to \u201crecognize what they\u2019ve declared in the material truth it has become\u201d (144). Joudah approaches the rubble and the reality it intimates in a poetry unbounded by form; he understands the English in which he writes as the discursive arm of a politics that prohibits Palestine from the \u201call\u201d and \u201chumanity\u201d it otherwise claims.<\/p>\n<p>Rawan Hussein, a Palestinian poet of Gaza, consolidates the Exhibit in this searingly idiomatic system: her poems, together with those of Nima Hassan, bring forth voices numbered one through five. Rawan\u2019s first name runs directly under the title; Hussein, her surname, follows, held together with Gaza by a taught comma; and then, Rawan Hussein, Gaza\u2014people and place\u2014break in time, secured to another comma that leads to 2021. Joudah reminds us to engage the signs that deliver our consistent destruction. We remember 2021, the year of the \u201cUnity Intifada\u201d met with Israel\u2019s undying attempts to erase Gaza, Palestine. We see page twelve at the end of Poem #1 of 5. We count the years. Stop counting, she tells us and arrive at time. We peer back through twelve more cruel years before our today, 2014. 2014 signifies numbers not on the calendar. We read Israel\u2019s cruel naming of that year in the casually lethal \u201cBattle of Withered Grain,\u201d clear in its pronouncement of forced famine, a gradual genocide begun long before the Gaza Soup Kitchen\u2019s formation. The horizon from which the sun should rise burns up as it reaches Hussein and Joudah from Gaza 2014, Gaza 2021, Gaza 2026.<\/p>\n<p>Hussein\u2019s signature appears in italics before the poem\u2019s first utterance, an inverted and deterritorialized \u201ctakhallus\u201d forced out of the Arabic poetic tradition\u2019s signatures delivered at a poem\u2019s end, after which one may leave verse. We do not leave Rawan\u2019s poetry. \u201cDawn broke on our heads,\u201d writes Rawan Hussein:<\/p>\n<p style=\"padding-left: 40px;\">Time set itself aside<br \/>\nand places shut their eyes,<br \/>\nlike a girl with words<br \/>\nthat gray behind her lids.<br \/>\nCeilings tumbled<br \/>\nwaterfalls of stone,<br \/>\nand under the rubble<br \/>\nthe last perceived image<br \/>\nhangs: a final painting<br \/>\nsculpted on our faces.<br \/>\nAlone we grow old tonight<br \/>\nweave hours and wear them,<br \/>\ngobble the terror that runs<br \/>\ndown our kids\u2019 mouths.<br \/>\nSomeone will devour<br \/>\nour rusted lips.<\/p>\n<p>Hussein\u2019s words struggle against the fatalistic consistency that persists in the Exhibit\u2019s disorienting march through Palestine in ruins. They return to the silent \u201clips\u201d that guide Joudah\u2019s \u201cTruth is Never Finished\u201d, here \u201crusted\u201d as rubble rather than left in the \u201cdirt.\u201d Hussein\u2019s poem engages the structuring of temporal and material reality against Palestinian life, now with a painfully modern hue. Across the page we find another number, sixty-seven; it carries us to the beat of a broken watch, our entry into Palestinian time. Sixty-seven holds the image of a man in motion: he first walks away and then toward us, again. We remember 1967, the Naksa, the \u201csetback\u201d on liberation already left behind English\u2019s ticking clock.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cThe Palestinian body creates the overlap zone between Arabic and English. In that zone, the body renders the alphabet illiterate,\u201d writes Joudah, as we exit <em>Exhibit G<\/em> (164). Gaza, as language, brings into existence the only path through manufactured borders, built from letters and walls and calendars and clocks and narratives that try to contain it, once and for all. Palestine, still, is the way back: to home, to return, to the Arabic poetic heritage that rises again from Gaza\u2019s ruins.<\/p>\n<p><span lang=\"EN\">To read this collection and see, hear, and feel Gaza within it is to speak the language of Palestine\u2019s continual endurance. Joudah\u2019s collection is one uniquely and honestly guided by Gaza and her people, amidst a contemporary scene of diasporic Palestinian and Arab poetry often adherent to the literary industry\u2019s neutralized politics of lettered sanctity, whether in English or Arabic.\u00a0<i>Exhibit G<\/i> reminds us that no language\u2014not Arabic, nor Joudah\u2019s English in the diaspora\u2014may utter even a single letter, \u201cG\u201d, otherwise.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span lang=\"EN\">Gaza and her language, the only path to \u201cforever.\u201d Gaza, the beginning of always.<\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Fady Joudah\u2019s Exhibit G is among the first of its kind. The multimedia poetry collection\u2014assembled in the diaspora, and yet, across form, content, and voice, never anywhere but Gaza\u2014charts Palestinian life under genocide. Exhibit G continues Joudah\u2019s poetic meditation on<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":32256,"featured_media":277256,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"om_disable_all_campaigns":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[43069,6,43070],"tags":[112366,35870,8632,1210,212],"class_list":["post-276963","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-craftandcriticism","category-features","category-literary-criticism","tag-exhibit-g","tag-fady-joudah","tag-gaza","tag-palestine","tag-poetry"],"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p5rKFr-1a39","jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/09\/Screenshot-2026-09-18-at-5.17.16-PM.png","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/276963","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/32256"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=276963"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/276963\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/277256"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=276963"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=276963"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=276963"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}},{"id":277041,"date":"2026-09-23T05:08:46","date_gmt":"2026-09-23T09:08:46","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/?p=277041"},"modified":"2026-09-21T21:24:25","modified_gmt":"2026-09-22T01:24:25","slug":"how-weimar-germanys-proportional-democracy-put-hitler-in-power","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/how-weimar-germanys-proportional-democracy-put-hitler-in-power\/","title":{"rendered":"How Weimar Germany\u2019s Proportional Democracy Put Hitler in Power"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>\u201cWe warn our opponents not to drive us to the uttermost,\u201d he bellowed. \u201cHunger is preferable to disgrace, and deprivation is to be preferred to dishonor.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>And, as it turned out, the harsh terms of the treaty caused massive resentment, which eventually was transformed into political\u2014and military\u2014action.<\/p>\n<p>A proportional elective system, in which a political party earns representation based on the percentage of votes it receives rather than the first-past-the-post winner-take-all system, ensures that a wide variety of beliefs will have a voice. To elect government leaders, the different parties form coalitions in the absence of an outright majority. In a closely divided government, the smallest parties, whose few votes could determine the majority, wield power far greater than their electoral support would indicate. It also ensures that numerous parties with different ideologies will be competing for votes.<\/p>\n<p>While in theory this system might seem to be the purest form of representative democracy, in practice it has often led to fragmented or unstable governments, weakened by a continuous shifting in the combinations of ruling parties. In the Weimar Republic, for example, at various times more than forty different political parties won seats in the Reichstag. Among them were Ebert\u2019s liberal Social Democratic Party (SDP), the moderate Centre Party, the Communist Party (KPD), and the far-right German Workers\u2019 Party, which evolved into the National Socialist German Workers\u2019 Party.<\/p>\n<p>The Nazi Party.<\/p>\n<p>The party was originally formed in 1919 by a small group of men, among them a locksmith and a sportswriter, established to appeal to middle-class workers alienated by the terms imposed on the nation by the Treaty of Versailles and suffering from the inability of the Weimar government to stabilize the economy. Rather than supporting democratic reforms, from the beginning it adopted anti-government, anti-Communist, and anti-Semitic policies. Its weekly meetings were held in the back of a beer hall in Munich.<\/p>\n<p>The German Army, alarmed by the Communist leanings of some of the small parties that had sprung up, assigned soldiers to attend their meetings and submit reports. In September 1919, war veteran Corporal Adolf Hitler was sent to monitor the right-wing Workers\u2019 Party. Hitler had been born in Austria-Hungary. After being rejected by an art school in Vienna, he earned a meager living selling small watercolors and drawings. To escape compulsory military service, he had moved to Munich, but when the Great War began, he enlisted and served on the Western Front, where he was wounded. When assigned to report on the meetings in the beer hall, he finally found a place he belonged. He embraced the party\u2019s radical, anti-Semitic policies, which fit perfectly with his own racist, ultranationalistic views. He became the fifty-fifth member of the party.<\/p>\n<p>Hitler\u2019s extraordinary public speaking skills enabled him to rise rapidly to party leadership, and after being discharged from the army he began working for the party full-time. In his early speeches he began referring to Germans as Aryans, a \u201cpure\u201d master race responsible for all significant human accomplishments. As he later would write in his political autobiography and manifesto, <i>Mein Kampf<\/i>, \u201cMy Struggle,\u201d \u201cEverything we admire on this earth today\u2014science and art, technology and inventions\u2014is only the creative product of a few peoples and originally perhaps one race.\u201d<\/p>\n<p class=\"pullquote\">When Germany was ravaged\u2014just like the rest of the world\u2014by the 1929 Depression, Hitler was politically well positioned to respond to the needs and desires, but mostly the fears, of the people.<\/p>\n<p>Aryans.<\/p>\n<p>As the divided Weimar government continued to prove itself incapable of dealing with the myriad economic problems facing the country, more Germans began to search for radical solutions. By 1923 the Nazi Party had attracted more than fifty thousand members, among them the widely admired World War I general Erich Ludendorff. Hitler and Ludendorff believed the party was powerful enough to stage a revolution.<\/p>\n<p>Their attempted coup began in the Munich Beer Hall. The Nazis claimed they had seized control of the Bavarian state government, believing Germans across the nation would rise in support and overthrow the Weimar government. \u201cThe government of criminals sitting in Berlin is deprived of office,\u201d Hitler boasted. \u201cTomorrow will see the execution of a nationalist government in Germany, or it will see us dead. There is no middle course.\u201d General Ludendorff was proclaimed dictator. In Berlin, President Ebert declared that Hitler, Ludendorff, and anyone who supported them were traitors. Rather than joining the rebellion, the army remained loyal to the government. The next day Munich police confronted an estimated two thousand Nazis marching toward the center of the city; in a shootout, sixteen Nazis, four police officers, and a bystander were killed. Hitler was arrested and tried for treason. His month-long trial gave him both publicity and a platform to spread Nazi propaganda. As \u201csteel-helmet soldiers reinforced by Munich police\u201d prevented pro-Nazi demonstrations, Hitler was found guilty of treason and sentenced to five years in prison, but the trial had become a great victory for the party.<\/p>\n<p>General Ludendorff was acquitted, perhaps due to the respect he had earned during the war.<\/p>\n<p>Rather than serving five years, Hitler was released from Landsberg Castle Prison after slightly more than eight months. While serving his sentence, Hitler wrote <i>Mein Kampf<\/i>. In it, he left no doubt about his intentions, declaring, \u201cThe weapon of ruthless, brute force is of greatest value in war between two diverse views of the world&#8230;The 1914 frontiers mean nothing to Germany\u2019s future. They were not a protection in the past, and they would not mean power in the future.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>Many European and American politicians tended to dismiss the threat, believing, as the <i>Brooklyn Eagle <\/i>reported, that his release \u201cindicates that the Bavarian Government has ceased to care about Hitlerites. Their complete defeat in the recent elections indicates popular sentiment has turned against them.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>That confidence was shaken in 1925 when seventy-eight-year-old Field Marshal Paul von Hindenburg, the commander of the German military during the war, became the first president of the Reich directly elected by the people. He received nine hundred thousand more votes than his opponent. The conservative, authoritarian Hindenburg was the candidate of the nationalistic right, and many supporters believed he would use his power to destroy the republic from the inside, but in his inaugural address he said, \u201cNo war, no inner insurrection, can free our fettered and disunited nation. It needs long, quiet, peaceful work&#8230;The President is especially called upon to uphold the sacredness of justice.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>Despite the challenges he faced, Hindenburg managed to bring a period of calm and some prosperity to Germany. The economy was stabilized by currency reforms and increased foreign investment\u2014although that required borrowing substantial sums from America to pay war reparations and support industry. Several agreements signed with wartime enemies in 1925 to respect the existing borders led to Germany joining the League of Nations, restoring some national pride and allowing the country to begin participating in international affairs. German culture once more began playing a significant role in the arts; the Bauhaus, for example, the renowned school of art, architecture, and design founded in Germany in 1919, significantly influenced creative arts throughout the world. The constitutional liberties also resulted in a vibrant culture that transformed Berlin into a cosmopolitan intellectual center.<\/p>\n<p>But underneath the glamor, the glitz, and the economic recovery, the repressive Nazi movement continued growing in strength and numbers\u2014waiting. When Germany was ravaged\u2014just like the rest of the world\u2014by the 1929 Depression, Hitler was politically well positioned to respond to the needs and desires, but mostly the fears, of the people.<\/p>\n<p>*<\/p>\n<p>The Nazi propaganda machine that Hitler created with Joseph Goebbels and architect Albert Speer was a masterful m\u00e9lange of politics and psychology, creating an encompassing culture designed to reinforce the image of the invincible leader. Der F\u00fchrer, the leader, as he later would refer to himself, was portrayed as a man who understood their struggles in the world. The party had begun holding meticulously planned rallies every few years in Nuremberg. They were choreographed to evoke emotions, to make people feel they were part of an unstoppable movement greater than themselves\u2014that they mattered. By 1929, the <i>Chicago Tribune <\/i>was reporting that at that year\u2019s rally \u201c120,000 uniformed Hitlerites marched past their leader,\u201d although other outlets estimated far lower numbers.<\/p>\n<p>Still, before the Depression the radical Nazi Party had remained on the fringes of electoral power. In the 1928 elections, it had managed to win only 12 of the 491 seats in the Reichstag. But when the American Stock Market collapsed a year later, Germany was especially hard hit. American banks demanded the repayment of recent loans to the country, which increased the pressure on the German economy. Just as in the United States, businesses failed, unemployment soared, hyper-inflation wiped out savings, and by the middle of 1931, almost all the banks had closed.<\/p>\n<p>The Reichstag struggled and mostly failed to provide any meaningful assistance, so President Hindenburg claimed emergency powers and with Chancellor Heinrich Br\u00fcning began issuing decrees allowing the government to institute economic reforms. Nothing helped. The promises of democracy had failed. By 1932, more than six million workers were unemployed and industrial production had fallen an estimated 42 percent. Desperate Germans again began looking for other solutions, and the extremist political parties, the Nazis on the right and the Communists on the left, gained significant support. Hitler\u2019s National Socialists became the second-largest party in the Reichstag. It was no longer possible to dismiss its influence.<\/p>\n<p>During a crisis, people often look for scapegoats, desperate to blame someone, anyone, any entity for their problems. The Nazis had always preached German racial purity, accusing Jews, Communists, liberals, and non-Aryans of weakening the nation. As misery spread, so did the virulent anti-Semitism.<\/p>\n<p>The presidential election of 1932 pitted eighty-four-year-old Hindenburg, representing the anti-Nazi centrist parties, forty-two-year-old Hitler, Communist Ernst Th\u00e4lmann, and Theodor Duesterberg, the head of a large veterans\u2019 organization, against each other. Hitler campaigned across the nation, becoming one of the first politicians to utilize a chartered airplane, which enabled him to attend as many as four rallies a day. And the rallies were spectacles, staged with dramatic lighting and music, featuring bold symbols like the eagle and swastika. A <i>Toronto Star <\/i>reporter wrote:<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>Adolph Hitler entered the arena. Eight thousand men and women leaped erect, stretching their hands in the Fascist salute. The roar of &#8216;Heil Hitler\u2019 penetrated far beyond the walls and were echoed back by the multitude standing in the streets of Munich&#8230;<\/p>\n<p>Inside the arena Hitler spoke. He was an evangelist speaking to a camp meeting&#8230;his converts moved with him, laughed with him, felt with him. They booed with him the French. They hissed with him the republic. The 8,000 were an instrument on which Hitler played a symphony of national passion&#8230;Hitler, the evangelist, could found a new religion. Hitler, the actor, could sway packed theatres. Hitler, the orator, could make a revolution.<\/p>\n<p>Adolph Hitler is the hero a million people worship; the threat that Europe fears.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>Hindenburg ran a more traditional campaign, positioning himself as a national hero who could bring together the moderate parties to form a stable democratic government. Th\u00e4lmann also campaigned heavily, blaming the capitalist system for causing the economic disaster and promising to replace it with a government modeled after the Soviet Union, in which land and industry belonged to all the people and the wealth of the nation was spread to the middle and lower classes.<\/p>\n<p>The German electoral system provided for two rounds of voting; if no candidate received a majority of votes in the first round, a runoff would be held several weeks later. American newspapers forecast that \u201cit would be a close race, with the idolized Hindenburg stemming the Fascist tide by a narrow margin, although not by enough to re-elect him&#8230;Frequent public references in the campaign to the danger of civil war&#8230;if Hitler is not elected served to heighten the national tension.\u201d In the first round Hindenburg received 49.6 percent of the vote, tantalizingly close to a majority but still requiring a run-off weeks later. Hitler lost by more than seven million votes, getting only about 30 percent. But the possibility existed that a Fascist could still win the presidency. <i>The Des Moines Register <\/i>cautioned, \u201cIf Hitler wins in April the future of the nation and even of Europe is to a great extent uncertain.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>The world was temporarily reassured in April 1932 when Hindenburg won the runoff with 53 percent of the vote, even though Hitler increased his support by more than two million votes. After the results were known, Hitler claimed he had achieved \u201ca great victory. Despite persecution and oppression&#8230;you have proved yourselves worthy to carry further the banner of national freedom. Tomorrow a new battle begins.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>To try to quell the increasingly militant right wing, Hindenburg appointed conservative diplomat Franz von Papen the new chancellor. Papen was an ambitious monarchist who believed an authoritarian government, with the power to make and impose decisions, was necessary to bring Germany out of the Depression.<\/p>\n<p>Hitler had lost his election, but was winning the electorate. In many parliamentary systems, under certain conditions the leader of the government, the president or prime minister, can dissolve the assembly and call for new, unscheduled elections. Hindenburg made a huge mistake; believing he could restore confidence in his government, he called for another round of elections in late July. Rather than reinforcing support for Chancellor Papen, the election allowed the Nazis to solidify their April gains; they won an incredible 230 of the 608 seats with 37 percent of the vote, more seats than any party had won in the brief history of the Weimar government. Suddenly, the Nazis were the most powerful party in the Reichstag. The Social Democrats lagged well behind with 21 percent, and the Communists trailed with 14 percent.<\/p>\n<p>*<\/p>\n<p>As the leader of the dominant party, Hitler demanded that Hindenburg appoint him chancellor. The idea repulsed the president. It was well-known that he despised Hitler, and purportedly responded, \u201cThat man for a Chancellor? I\u2019ll make him a postmaster and he can lick the stamps with my head on them.\u201d Bold words, but it had become obvious that Hitler could not be ignored. As yet another parliamentary election in November demonstrated, Papen had lost whatever credibility he once had; the desperate Hindenburg replaced him as chancellor with another right-winger, General Kurt von Schleicher, in a last-ditch attempt to deal with Hitler. That proved to be politically disastrous; Schleicher\u2019s effort to split the Nazi Party by supporting Hitler\u2019s main rival was a dismal failure.<\/p>\n<p class=\"pullquote\">The number of votes for or against him made no difference. Hitler had used the tools of democracy to destroy it. The election was neither free nor fair.<\/p>\n<p>German politics had become confusing, complex, and highly combustible. Hitler did not hold an elective office, although arguably his ability to control his mass following made him as powerful as any elected official. But while the army remained loyal to the Weimar government, as shaky as it was, his options were limited. To achieve his objective of destroying the government, he first had to become part of it.<\/p>\n<p>Hindenburg finally decided he had to deal directly with the threat posed by Hitler. He was persuaded by Papen to bring Hitler into the government, where he could be controlled.<\/p>\n<p>It was a remarkable gamble: By giving Hitler power, Hindenburg believed, he could contain his power.<\/p>\n<p>On January 30, 1933, after several days of negotiations, Hitler was named chancellor. The United Press service reported, \u201cPresident Paul von Hindenburg has insisted on a cabinet wherein the Nazi leader and his colleagues shall have only a minority of available places. It is obvious the old Field Marshall does not intend to&#8230;allow Hitler to install Fascism and a permanent dictatorship of his Brown Shirts, if it can be prevented.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cThe question is, can it be prevented?\u201d<\/p>\n<p>The reporter doubted it, adding, \u201cThis insignificant appearing little man with a Charlie Chaplin moustache is one of the world\u2019s greatest demagogues and a first-class politician.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>Adolf Hitler had never personally won election to any government office. Instead, he had successfully plugged into the zeitgeist, the prevailing mood of the German people, and used their support to rise to the pinnacle of the republic. As the <i>Chicago Tribune <\/i>explained it at the time, \u201cHitler restored to the millions of his followers faith in themselves, faith in their own country, faith in their future. For this, millions of Germans idolize him.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>And after Hindenburg invited him into the government, Hitler moved rapidly to transform Germany into a dictatorship. His first action was to convince the president to hold another round of parliamentary elections the following March. The campaign was marked with violence, as Nazis intimidated and beat people, broke up meetings, and ransacked newspaper offices and printers with absolute impunity.<\/p>\n<p>The legal takeover of the nation began five days before those elections were scheduled to take place when a massive fire broke out in the Reichstag. A twenty-four-year old Dutch Communist, Marinus van der Lubbe, was caught at the scene, supposedly carrying plans to set additional government buildings and palaces on fire. According to reports, this was to spark an uprising, a \u201cbloody Bolshevik revolution and civil war.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>Almost immediately questions were raised about this claim; it was considered unusual for an arsonist to have his passport and planning documents with him when committing his crime, and how one man could carry so much gasoline into the building was never made clear. There was considerable speculation that Nazis had actually set fire to the Reichstag. While van der Lubbe was convicted of high treason and arson and executed by guillotine, historians have never found sufficient evidence to determine what actually happened that night.<\/p>\n<p>Whoever instigated the attack, the fire provided the excuse the Nazis needed to seize additional power. While firemen were still battling the flames, the cabinet drafted an emergency decree \u201cfor the protection of the Germen people against the Communist danger,\u201d which allowed the government to basically impose martial law. Civil liberties were suspended and political opponents were imprisoned. The Communist Party was essentially outlawed; about one hundred Communist members of the Reichstag were arrested, opposition rallies were banned, and leftist newspapers were prohibited from publishing. Six thousand Nazi storm troopers were given guns and truncheons and granted police powers. In the following days, as many as four thousand people were imprisoned.<\/p>\n<p>The right-wing members of Hindenburg\u2019s cabinet had failed to exercise any control over the Nazis. Europe feared the outcome. <i>The Times of London <\/i>wrote that the Continent \u201cis facing a calamity as great as that which came with the declaration of war nineteen years ago.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>The outcome of the parliamentary elections was assured. The vote totals didn\u2019t matter: The Nazis had taken control. \u201cThe German democracy, after a precarious life of 15 years, has succumbed,\u201d the AP reported. \u201cChancellor Adolph Hitler, by ruthless suppression of the opposition parties, by occupying Communist headquarters and breaking up political meetings, and by mustering his Brown Shirt volunteers in every important city to terrorize the voters, has negated in advance whatever vote the German people may emit tomorrow.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>As Chancellor Hitler demanded, within weeks the new Parliament passed the Enabling Act, which gave the cabinet\u2014over which he had total control\u2014dictatorial powers. \u201cHereafter,\u201d it read, \u201cthe Chancellor will simply proclaim laws decided upon by the cabinet. These laws will not require the approval of the Reichstag&#8230;Laws proclaimed by the chancellor may deviate from the constitution.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>Speaking from a balcony, as the huge jubilant crowd roared \u201cHeil Hitler,\u201d he said, \u201cThe first chapter of our movement is closed. Now we begin the second.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>Throughout the rest of 1933 Hitler consolidated his power. He abolished all the other political parties and trade unions, he arrested opponents and sent them to the first concentration camp, Dachau, which became a training camp for guards and a model for the thousands of additional camps that would be established. He began systemic persecution of Jews, including starting a nationwide boycott of Jewish-owned businesses and prohibiting them from holding government jobs, teaching in universities, or practicing law. He appointed governors to exercise control over the various state parliaments. And he took the first steps toward rearmament by withdrawing from the League of Nations, which had limited the nation\u2019s military.<\/p>\n<p>The only person who could have stopped him was the aged Reichspr\u00e4sident Hindenburg. But for a variety of complex reasons, he failed to act. When Paul von Hindenburg died in August 1934, his son, Colonel Oskar von Hindenburg, announced that just before his death his father had designated Hitler as his \u201cdirect successor as head of the German State.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>Hitler named himself president and chancellor, declaring himself Der F\u00fchrer, the unrestrained leader of the nation, and held a referendum to confirm that this was the will of the people. Although he received almost 90 percent of the forty-two million votes cast, American newspapers, perhaps searching for some positive news, noted that this was fewer votes than he had gotten only months before.<\/p>\n<p>The number of votes for or against him made no difference. Hitler had used the tools of democracy to destroy it. The election was neither free nor fair.<\/p>\n<p>In addition to fraud, throughout history, powerful men have intimidated voters to deliver the election results they demanded. Fear is an effective political tool. The Nazi party had proved that dissent was dangerous, sometimes deadly. Political enemies had been imprisoned or killed. The 1933 Law against the Founding of New Parties had essentially ended any organized opposition. Conversely, the Nazi Party had begun restoring the German pride that had been surrendered in the Treaty of Versailles. Ebert\u2019s plea to the victorious Allies to treat his nation with respect and economic decency after the Great War had been ignored. So, while some voters were intimidated into supporting Hitler\u2019s referendum, many others did so to celebrate Germany\u2019s return to the world stage as a powerful nation that had to be respected.<\/p>\n<p>The results of that election\u2014while certainly not legitimate\u2014made the world pay attention.<\/p>\n<p>During the next few years, he rebuilt the German military and instituted more and stronger racial and anti-Semitic laws. He created an oath to the F\u00fchrer, in which Germans pledged their unconditional allegiance to him rather than the state. In late 1934, more than seven hundred thousand people attended the now annual Nazi rally in Nuremberg, which became a massive propaganda victory when the documentary made by Leni Riefenstahl, <i>Triumph of the Will<\/i>, introduced the rebuilt militant Germany to a global audience. The 1936 Berlin Olympics provided a platform to show the world how Germany had emerged from the ruins of the Great War to once again become a powerful nation whose rights and desires had to be recognized and respected by the rest of the world.<\/p>\n<p>Europe did not know how to deal with this new Germany. During the ceremonial march of nations into the Olympic stadium, for example, the <i>Atlanta Constitution <\/i>reported, \u201cSensational enthusiasm was evoked by the French squad, which not only dipped its colors but gave the Nazi salute during the entire circuit of the track. Hitler stood, returning the salute.\u201d But that same newspaper informed readers, \u201cFrance, alarmed by Hitler\u2019s reoccupation of the Rhineland and the disintegration of the Versailles and Locarno pacts, built a monster line of subterranean forts along the Rhine and speeded her munitions factories.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>Hitler truly began pursuing his dream of a vast German empire, a Third Reich that would last for a thousand years, when he annexed Austria in 1938. World War II began on September 1, 1939, when German troops attacked Poland, causing England and France to declare war. By the time the F\u00fchrer committed suicide in his bunker beneath a Berlin street on April 30, 1945, and Germany surrendered a week later, more than seventy countries had been involved in the conflict. As many as fifty million civilians and twenty-five million soldiers\u2014including 5.3 million German troops\u2014had been killed. In hundreds of concentration camps in Germany, Poland, Austria, and other occupied countries, six million Jews, more than a third of all the Jews in the world, had been murdered. It was the deadliest war in history. Vast parts of Germany and much of Europe were reduced to rubble, traditional borders across Europe had been erased, and an estimated twenty million people were homeless. The chaos created by Hitler resonated for decades. In the years following the war new political alliances had been forged, new nations had been created, a Cold War between the Western Allies and the Eastern Communist bloc had begun, bloody border disputes erupted in Europe and the Middle East, and regional wars had become almost common.<\/p>\n<p>Beginning in the back room of a beer hall, with only a few other men, Hitler has become a symbol of evil equal to the most reviled villains of history. But his life, and his rise to power, remain a vitally important lesson of how democratic institutions can be perverted for individual gain.<\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: center;\">____________________________<\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: center;\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" data-attachment-id=\"277042\" data-permalink=\"https:\/\/lithub.com\/how-weimar-germanys-proportional-democracy-put-hitler-in-power\/final-cover-the-elections-that-changed-the-world-9781335002174_cc\/\" data-orig-file=\"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/09\/Final-Cover-THE-ELECTIONS-THAT-CHANGED-THE-WORLD-9781335002174_CC-scaled.jpg\" data-orig-size=\"1687,2560\" data-comments-opened=\"1\" data-image-meta=\"{&quot;aperture&quot;:&quot;0&quot;,&quot;credit&quot;:&quot;&quot;,&quot;camera&quot;:&quot;&quot;,&quot;caption&quot;:&quot;&quot;,&quot;created_timestamp&quot;:&quot;0&quot;,&quot;copyright&quot;:&quot;&quot;,&quot;focal_length&quot;:&quot;0&quot;,&quot;iso&quot;:&quot;0&quot;,&quot;shutter_speed&quot;:&quot;0&quot;,&quot;title&quot;:&quot;&quot;,&quot;orientation&quot;:&quot;0&quot;,&quot;alt&quot;:&quot;&quot;}\" data-image-title=\"Final Cover THE ELECTIONS THAT CHANGED THE WORLD 9781335002174_CC\" data-image-description=\"\" data-image-caption=\"\" data-large-file=\"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/09\/Final-Cover-THE-ELECTIONS-THAT-CHANGED-THE-WORLD-9781335002174_CC-675x1024.jpg\" class=\"alignnone size-medium wp-image-277042\" src=\"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/09\/Final-Cover-THE-ELECTIONS-THAT-CHANGED-THE-WORLD-9781335002174_CC-198x300.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"198\" height=\"300\" srcset=\"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/09\/Final-Cover-THE-ELECTIONS-THAT-CHANGED-THE-WORLD-9781335002174_CC-198x300.jpg 198w, https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/09\/Final-Cover-THE-ELECTIONS-THAT-CHANGED-THE-WORLD-9781335002174_CC-675x1024.jpg 675w, https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/09\/Final-Cover-THE-ELECTIONS-THAT-CHANGED-THE-WORLD-9781335002174_CC-768x1166.jpg 768w, https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/09\/Final-Cover-THE-ELECTIONS-THAT-CHANGED-THE-WORLD-9781335002174_CC-40x60.jpg 40w, https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/09\/Final-Cover-THE-ELECTIONS-THAT-CHANGED-THE-WORLD-9781335002174_CC-1012x1536.jpg 1012w, https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/09\/Final-Cover-THE-ELECTIONS-THAT-CHANGED-THE-WORLD-9781335002174_CC-1349x2048.jpg 1349w, https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/09\/Final-Cover-THE-ELECTIONS-THAT-CHANGED-THE-WORLD-9781335002174_CC-33x50.jpg 33w, https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/09\/Final-Cover-THE-ELECTIONS-THAT-CHANGED-THE-WORLD-9781335002174_CC-scaled.jpg 1687w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 198px) 100vw, 198px\" \/><\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: center;\"><em>Excerpted from <\/em><a href=\"https:\/\/bookshop.org\/a\/132\/9781335002174\">The Elections That Changed the World: Fifteen Pivotal Moments That Shaped How We Live<\/a><em> by Dana Bash, with David Fisher. Copyright \u00a9 2026 by Dana Bash and David Fisher. Published by arrangement of Hanover Square Press\/HarperCollins Publishers.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>\u201cWe warn our opponents not to drive us to the uttermost,\u201d he bellowed. \u201cHunger is preferable to disgrace, and deprivation is to be preferred to dishonor.\u201d And, as it turned out, the harsh terms of the treaty caused massive resentment,<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":32212,"featured_media":277092,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"om_disable_all_campaigns":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[6,43101,43092,43095],"tags":[8040,112280,112281,8354,8694,12167,2765,50027,56926,16419,112282,8695,20075],"class_list":["post-277041","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-features","category-history","category-newsandculture","category-politics","tag-authoritarianism","tag-dana-bash","tag-david-fisher","tag-democracy","tag-elections","tag-europe","tag-germany","tag-hanover-square-press","tag-harpercollins-publishers","tag-nazism","tag-the-elections-that-changed-the-world-fifteen-pivotal-moments-that-shaped-how-we-live","tag-voting","tag-weimar-germany","story-type-elections"],"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p5rKFr-1a4p","jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/09\/reichstagsbrand-web-1.jpg","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/277041","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/32212"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=277041"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/277041\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/277092"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=277041"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=277041"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=277041"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}]